National Poetry Month Reading with M.C. Rydel, Aaron Baker, and Heather McClelland

Indie bookstore The Book Stall celebrates National Poetry Month with a reading on Sunday, April 23 at 2:00 pm! Join us at the store for an afternoon of poetry and discussion with M.C. Rydel, Heather McClelland, and Aaron Baker. Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, teachers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, and poets marking poetry’s important place in our lives. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Poets: M.C. Rydel lives in his native city of Chicago, worked for years as a Dean for the Hadley Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and now teaches literature and creative writing, and composition at Loyola University Chicago and the College of Lake County. M.C. has published poems in a variety of journals and performed at such iconic venues as Heirloom Books, Wicker Mic, the Elevator Sessions, In One Ear at the Heartland Café, the Flatts & Sharpe Music Company in Chicago, and the Parkside Lounge in New York City. His collection of poems, Almost a Memoir, was published in 2022. Learn more at www.mcrydel.com.

Aaron Baker earned a BA from Central Washington University and an MFA from the University of Virginia. His debut collection of poems, Mission Work, won a Katherine Bakeless Prize in Poetry and a Shenandoah Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Based on his experiences as a child of missionaries, Mission Work was praised for its rare “precision and immersion.” He has lived in Mexico, Germany, and Papua New Guinea. Baker’s honors include a Stegner Fellowship, a Henry Hoyns Fellowship in Creative Writing, a Ludwig Vogelstein Literary Fellowship, and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He is an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago.

Heather McClelland is a writer and teacher with an MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her creative work has been nominated for Best of the Net and two Pushcarts. Heather’s favorite pastime is when she writes poems on her typewriter at events with the Chicago collective “Poems While You Wait.” Heather teaches writing and literature at College of Lake County and serves on the board of the Stories Matter Foundation, the umbrella organization that supports StoryStudio Chicago, Chicago Review of Books, and the Chicago Stories Project.