free workshop at 2:30 p.m. as part of the Freight’s Open House

Transient Typewriter Project in the lobby from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.

Melrose Poetry Bureau is an all-star aggregation of local poets who came up through Youth Speaks and went on to participate in Brave New Voices and Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam, speaking their minds, baring their souls, and entertaining the hell out of audiences far and wide! These young poets – including Bobby Gordon, Nayeli Adorador-Knudsen, Rafa Casal, Nico Carey – will not only put on a high-energy spoken word performance, they’ll also tell stories about their high school experiences in the Bay Area, when they first picked up the pen and grabbed the mic, sharing poems from those days and adding back story and perspective on the work they did a decade ago. Think of it as a cross between Unplugged and a high school poetry reunion. To close the show, they’ll present new work that reveals who they’ve become and how they’ve evolved as artists.

Nayeli and Bobby founded Melrose Poetry Bureau as a way to bring poets and the public together. After working at Youth Speaks with such mentors as Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Paul Flores, and James Kass, and participating in typewriter installations at UCLA, they wanted to create more performance and educational opportunities for poets, including spoken word events, writing workshop residencies, typewriter installations, and poetry slams.

This evening’s Transient Typewriter Project offers a chance to meet the poets as they sit and type at manual typewriters stationed in the Freight lobby from 6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. The poets will use the conversations with audience members as inspiration for poems they’ll give away as gifts.