Weave & Spin Open Mic

Weave & Spin is not your run-of-the-mill open mic. It’s a safe space for all humans 18+ to share tales of life: from joy to trauma, from hilarity to drama. If you are a poet, storyteller, or musician, bring your truth. Each month will showcase one featured artist followed by an open mic. We particularly invite BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and anyone else who has waited too long to be heard.

Every 2nd Wednesday, 7-9pm (Doors open at 6:30pm)
Eno Arts Mill Gallery
Free admission, cash bar
Must be 18 to enter and participate

September 11 Featured Artist: JEFFERY BEAM

Photo by Caroline Vaughan
North Carolina native Jeffery Beam‘s over 25 award-winning works include Verdant, The Broken Flower, Gospel Earth, Visions of Dame Kind, New Beautiful Tendons: Collected Queer Poems 1969–2012, An Elizabethan Bestiary:Retold, Spectral Pegasus / Dark Movements―a collaboration with Welsh painter Clive Hicks-Jenkins (including a CD of the poems and an original new “antique” ballad “Pale Horse”), and the critical anthology about his mentor Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards. Troubadour: Collaborations and Inventions in Music 1971-2023 was published in conjunction with an April 2023 Mallarmé Music concert celebrating Beam’s 70th birthday and the many composers who have set his poems to music. His two CD multimedia collection What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001 was an Audio Publishers Award finalist. In 2015 Beam co-curated, with photographer John M. Hall, an exhibition of Hall’s photographs of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer’s Lynchburg home for the UNC-CH Center for the Study of the American South. Photographer Catharine Carter and Beam are collaborating on his children’s book The Droods, while another book Winter Lullabies, searches for a publisher. Works in progress are Bee, I’m Expecting You—world anthology of bee poems, facts, and folklore; and A Traveller of Thee: A Commonplace Book on Poetry and the Spirit. His work was surveyed in two major academic works on gay literature in America; he was photographed for Robert Giard’s Particular Voices documentary collection of American gay and lesbian writers; and he was interviewed for Duke University’s Rainbow Triangle Oral History Project. He served for ten years as a judge for the Lambda Book Awards and has reviewed books for The Lambda Book Review and other literary magazines. His work has been translated into Japanese, Italian, Polish, Slavic, and Russian.

Beam’s 2014 civil marriage and 2015 church blessing was the subject of Ray Whitehouse’s photodocumentary After 34 Years. Poetry editor emeritus of Oyster Boy Review, Beam grew up Kannapolis, North Carolina, has lived in Orange County since 1975, and retired in 2011 after 35 years as a UNC‐Chapel Hill botanical librarian. He lives in Hillsborough with his husband of forty-four years Stanley Finch. You can access a number of poems, interviews, audio and video, and excerpts from reviews and other articles, as well as view an hour-long retrospective reading on his website, www.jefferybeam.com