Nexus Poets of New Bern will host its monthly “First Tuesday” poetry open mic in May with featured poet Regina Garcia, author of the new debut collection, The Firetalker’s Daughter. Following her reading, the mike will be open to other readers of their original poetry. All are welcome to read or to listen. For more information, including the evening’s Zoom link, or to sign up to read, email nexus [at] nexuspoets.com.

Regina Y. C. Garcia is the recipient the 2021 National DAR American Heritage Poetry Award and was a semifinalist for the North Carolina Literary Review’s James Applewhite Award. Her work is published in a variety of journals and anthologies. She has both written and video poetry featured in The South Florida Poetry Journal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, The Book of Black, Black and…, The Amistad, The Black Light Project (a documentary), New Note Poetry, Compass Rose Literary Journal, The Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. She also has poetry and voice work featured in the Sacred 9 Project, a series of musical and literary compositions arranged by Curtis Raybon, Director of Choirs at Tulane University.

Jaki Shelton Green, poet laureate of North Carolina, praises The Firetalker’s Daughter (Finishing Line Press, 2023) as “an offering, incantation, and invocation that taps into the power physically or metaphorically of fire…[and] the questions of reconciling fearsome nature with goodness and peacefulness as seen through this divine elemental creation.”

Garcia is a professor of English at Pitt Community College. She holds a B.A. in Speech Communication with a concentration in the Oral Interpretation of Literature from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a master’s in education with a graduate certificate in Multicultural and Transnational Literature from East Carolina University. The mother of three grown sons, Garcia lives in Greenville, NC, with her husband.

The event is sponsored by Nexus Poets, a collective which has promoted poets and poetry in Eastern North Carolina since 2014.

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