Each month will feature a performance from an established poet, and folks are welcome to sign up to read their poems during the open mic. Hosted by Matthew Stepanic.

thom vernon is a writer, multi-media artist/performer, and academic. In addition to a long professional acting career in theatre/TV/film, thom is the author of two novels: The Drifts (Coach House 2010) and I Met Death & Sex Through My Friend, Tom Meuley (Guernica Editions 2024). A former Vanier Doctoral Scholar, he has a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of New Brunswick. thom won the 2023 National Magazine Silver Award and the 2022 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Prize for his essay "The Plague Came With No Directions" in which he finds a metaphor for living with HIV and overcoming trauma in getting stuck on a mountain. Currently, a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Cinema & Media Arts at York University, he is the guest editor of American Book Review's forthcoming special issue on failure and, with poet/theorist Lucas Crawford, the co-editor of the international poetry anthology Monosyllabic Queer Theory. His upcoming academic essay in a creative/academic anthology taking on identity and health lays the theoretical groundwork for stigma as a site of queer agency, knowledge acquisition and mobilization, and joy. His visual arts practice includes three short films exploring HIV stigma and an ongoing community-based video installation, Looking at You, Looking at Me, first installed at Buddies In Bad Times in 2017. He also builds sculptural poems from his personal HIV ARV bottles, medication paraphernalia and other found materials.