Join Cracked Walnut, the League of Minnesota Poets and the East Side Freedom Library for this edition of the 2023 Cracked Walnut Literary Festival – Theme: LGBTQ+

FEATURING: Michael Kiesow Moore ◼ John Medieros ◼ Venus De Mars ◼ Morgan Grayce Willow

Michael Kiesow Moore is the author of the poetry collections What to Pray For and The Song Castle (Nodin Press). His work has appeared in many journals such as International Times, Poetry City, and Water~Stone Review, anthologies like Queer Voices, Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience, and The Writer’s Almanac. Michael is the founder of the Birchbark Books Reading Series. When he is not drinking too much coffee, he can be found in Saint Paul dancing with The Braggarts Morris dancers.

John Medieros is a memoirist, poet, editor, and lawyer. His memoir, Self, Divided (Howling Bird Press) is the winner of the Howling Bird Press Nonfiction Prize. It was selected as a Finalist for a 2022 Minnesota Book Award in the Memoir and Creative Nonfiction category, and won Honorable Mention for the 2021 Forward INDIES Book of the Year Award. He has been a Finalist for numerous literary awards, including the Loft/McKnight Literary Prize, and the Brenda Ueland Prize for Nonfiction. Medieros was a Writer-in-Residence for the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts and co-curator of the Queer Voices Reading Series of Intermedia Arts for twelve years.

Venus De Mars is a multidisciplinary artist and musician, best known as a singer-songwriting transgender rock star and leader of the glam-punk trans-band Venus de Mars & All the Pretty Horses. Venus came out as transgender in 1988. She is now mid-process in writing a memoir reflecting her thirty-year  trans journey and place in this fast-changing, trans-embracing-backlashing world where we now find ourselves.  Venus and her band released their newest album “I Think The Darkness” on June 11th 2022.

Morgan Grayce Willow’s poetry collections and chapbooks include, among others, Dodge & Scramble, Between, Oddly Enough, and The Maps are Words. She has published in anthologies and journals such as Queer Nature, Ecopoetics, Queer Voices, Saint Paul Almanac, When We Become Weavers. Her prose publications include the title memoir in Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers and the lyric essay “(Un)Document(ing),” which was nominated for a Pushcart prize after its appearance in Water~Stone Review #22. Morgan completed the certificate program at Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) where she exhibited her artist’s book Collage for Mina Loy in 2016. In 2023, she curated “Beyond the Page: Poets as Artists in the New Year” at Friedli Gallery in Saint Paul. Morgan is currently a teaching artist with The Loft and COMPAS Artful Aging program.

This event is free and open to everyone for the cause of solidarity!