Grow a Cowboy Chapbook Launch Party
$5 suggested donation at the door.
About the Artists
Von Wise
Von Wise received his MFA for Creative Writing from Florida International University and is the author of Grow a Cowboy, winner of the 2025 Beyond Words Poetry Chapbook Awards. His poetry and prose have been published and anthologized by Lucky Jefferson, Inverted Syntax, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. He teaches English and Creative Writing in Philadelphia, where he lives.
Sara Mae
Sara Mae is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are the author of two chapbooks including Phantasmagossip, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest and released from YesYes Books in 2025. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, was published with Game Over Books. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshops alum, and a 2021 Sewanee Writer’s Conference Scholar. They write and release music as The Noisy. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville. Sara Mae is currently based in Philadelphia.
Bri Griffith
Bri Griffith is a poet and interdisciplinary artist; she earned her MFA in poetry from Florida International University in 2021. Her work has appeared in “Columbia Poetry Review,” “Court Green,” “FreezeRay,” and elsewhere. She was a Best New Poets nominee in 2021. Griffith is a writing instructor and professional tutor at Community College of Allegheny County, as well as a workshop facilitator for WritePGH; she lives and writes in Pittsburgh, PA.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She and E. J. Koh translated Yi Won’s The World’s Lightest Motorcycle (Zephyr Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Translation Grand Prize from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. Cancio-Bello has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Knight Foundation, and American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, The New York Times, Poets & Writers, and more. She is a member of the Starlings Collective, co-founder of the Adoptee Literary Festival, and a program manager for Miami Book Fair.