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B.Y.O.B. Poetry Series in Prospect Heights Seeks Submissions

 A new poetry reading series, "Readings in Color," will begin in Prospect Heights on Saturday, Dec. 6 at Color Brooklyn on Washington Avenue.
A new poetry reading series, "Readings in Color," will begin in Prospect Heights on Saturday, Dec. 6 at Color Brooklyn on Washington Avenue.
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PROSPECT HEIGHTS — Put some stanzas and some shiraz into your Saturday nights.

Two neighborhood poets are seeking submissions for a new poetry reading series they’re bringing to Prospect Heights this winter, one weekend a month.

The series, called “Readings in Color,” will begin on Saturday, December 6, said co-founder and Prospect-Lefferts Gardens resident Jenna Cardinale, who is organizing the B.Y.O.B event with her longtime friend Christine Scanlon, who lives in Prospect Heights.

The two will accept work from established writers, but are also soliciting work from local poetry students or “people who maybe haven’t had the experience to read their work in public … but feel like they have something they want to share,” Cardinale said.

The two women themselves met as students at a poetry MFA program at the New School in 2001. Since then, they’ve supported each other to continue writing — and now want to create a venue for others to experience poetry, too, in the form of an hour-long event featuring three writers who will read for about ten minutes each.

“I think that in order to give writing — particularly experimental, alternate-narrative kind of writing — a lot of attention, there needs to be a smaller amount of time to do that in,” Cardinale said.

Both she and Scanlon enjoy other local poetry readings — especially at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop in DUMBO and at Unnameable Books, also in Prospect Heights — but felt they wanted to created an poetry-only event with a “different aesthetic.” The reading will be curated, she said, with each segment featuring work that “can live together” narratively, as the two put it in their call for submissions.

“We want you to think in advance about what you would read,” Cardinale said.

The reading will take place in the back room of Color Brooklyn, an arts and crafts shop on Washington Avenue between Park and Sterling places — a perfect location, she said, to start a full Saturday night in Brooklyn.

“It’s a little bit of a pre-game for the rest of your evening,” she said. "You feel like you’ve done something good and cultural and productive — and then go to the bar nearby.”

Writers should submit work to “Readings in Color” by email: readingsincolor@gmail.com. The first reading will take place on Saturday, December 6 at 7 p.m. at 760 Washington Ave. in Brooklyn. It is B.Y.O.B, free and open to the public.