Partners of Evanston Public Library open mic night yields moving poetry performances

Cate Bouvet/The Daily Northwestern

The open mic’s featured poet, Christina Pugh, performed three poems, including one from her latest book, “The Right Hand,” which centers on chronic pain and healing.

Cate Bouvet, Senior Staffer

April 19, 2026

Cheers erupted as open mic performers delivered powerful slam poetry and imaginative haikus in the basement of Bookends & Beginnings on Friday.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, the Partners of the Evanston Public Library hosted its second annual Evening of Poetry & Community. The nonprofit raised more than $400 for the Evanston Public Library, according to PEPL Secretary Vaishali Patel.

“Working with Bookends & Beginnings has been really lovely,” Patel said. “We’re enjoying doing things out and with the community.”

Patel emphasized the diversity of ages, personalities and poetry styles at the reading. She said her favorite poem of the night was from Mary Roden, whose husband, Phil Roden, introduced her to the audience.

Phil Roden shared that his wife has had Parkinson’s, a disease that can cause speech and voice changes, for nearly 30 years. Phil Roden said that Mary Roden practiced in their kitchen for the reading for about a week.

The first poem Mary Roden read was called “Inside My Head.”

The Daily Northwestern · Mary Roden’s “Inside My Head.”

Mary Roden’s “Inside my Head.”

“All you can do is make a little joke, or hope no one notices,” Mary Roden read. “How easy it makes dying seem. A free fall past expectation, past responsibility, past regret. Sometimes it’s the living that seems too hard.”

The night’s featured poet, Christina Pugh, performed three poems. One was from her latest book, “The Right Hand,” which she said centers on chronic pain and healing. Pugh, an English professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, is also a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry.

Participant Zoe Knight performed two short poems and said it was their first poetry reading since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Daily Northwestern · Zoe Knight’s “Dead Spider on the Shower Floor of the Basement Bathroom at the Art School Open House.”

Zoe Knight’s “Dead Spider on the Shower Floor of the Basement Bathroom at the Art School Open House.”

“Memories decay like bodies when tucked away,” Knight read. “Yet at every unearthing, I am still surprised to see how little of you is left intact. I have no plaster cast or painted portrait to replace bones that fall to dust at my reluctant touch.”

Bookends & Beginnings Events and Marketing Manager Ana Croegaert said that although it is an independent bookstore, Bookends & Beginnings operates in the same ecosystem as Evanston Public Library, working to support literacy and the love of reading and writing.

Croegaert said several Bookends & Beginnings booksellers were present at the open mic, including Parker Kingsley, the author of “I Keep Home in My Bones and Starlight in My Veins.”

Kingsley read two original poems: “Expiration Date” and “Postmortem.”

“We’ve got an expiration date, and I’m counting down the days,” she read. “Three-thousand miles and I thought, well, I thought wrong. Darling, I’m still in the game. I haven’t a thing better to do because the ink is running off the pages and I know it’ll stain the carpet.”

PEPL President Seth Himrod said that although he isn’t a poet, it was really exciting to hear the participants’ spoken word. His son, Tim Himrod, performed a piece titled, “Can a Black Man Cry?”