The Marsh Celebrates National Poetry Month With APRIL SHOWERS. STREAMING POETS.

In honor of National Poetry Month, The Marsh is inviting a diverse lineup of accomplished poets to perform in April Showers. Streaming Poets., available via MarshStream. For this celebration, The Marsh has curated an entertaining evening featuring special guests Clyde Always, Gillian Conoley, Thea Matthews, and Christine No. Immediately following the performances, the poets will be joined by The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman for a roundtable discussion. Part of the Solo Performer Spotlight series, April Showers. Streaming Poets. will be streamed 7:30pm, Saturday, April 17. For more information, please visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream.

Clyde Always is an accomplished cartoonist, poet, painter, novelist, and Vaudevillian showman. The manuscript of his debut novel, Melanie Bell and the Story Salon, placed as a semi-finalist in the Faulkner Society William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. His writings, comics, and/or illustrations have been printed in Slackjaw, The Daily Squib, Scarfff, Poetalk, The Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, sPARKLE+bLINK, and The Broke Bohemian, among others. Always' artwork has been featured at gallery spaces around San Francisco including Bazaar Café, Eureka Valley Rec Center, and the Church Street Coffeehouse. A familiar face to The Marsh, he was last seen performing The Clyde Always Show in 2018, delighting audiences with his iconic hat, mustache, and ukulele.

Poet Gillian Conoley's most recent collection, A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat Books 2019), is a finalist for the California Book Award. In 2017, she received the Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. She was also awarded the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley is the author of seven previous books, including PEACE, an Academy of American Poets Standout Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Conoley is a Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Sonoma State University, where she edits Volt.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Thea Matthews is a queer Black Indigenous Mexican poet, Black feminist, educator, and activist. Her work has been published in Atlanta Review, Foglifter Journal, and The Rumpus, and her debut poetry collection Unearth [The Flowers] was recently published by Red Light Lit Press in 2020. She is currently an MFA candidate for Poetry at New York University.

Christine No is a child of Korean Immigrants. A writer and filmmaker, she is a Sundance Alum, VONA Fellow, two-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and Best of the Net Nominee. Her work can be found in The Rumpus, Entropy, Columbia Journal, The Harpoon Review, Story Magazine, sPARKLE+bLINK, Vagabond City, Apogee, Atlas And Alice, and various anthologies. No's first full length poetry collection is forthcoming by Barrelhouse.

MarshStream launched in April 2020 and has received overwhelmingly enthusiastic
response, garnering over 80,000 viewers over the past 11 months. Notable MarshStream moments thus far include the debut of MarshStream International Solo Fest, The Marsh's first- ever digital festival, and the U.S. premiere of The Invisible Line, a new documentary about one of the world's most famous social experiments gone wrong.

MarshStream programming varies daily, with Monday Night MarshStream (short performances by a variety of artists), Wild Card Tuesdays (everything from book/writer discussions, sing-a-longs, Tell It On Tuesday, to Sound Healing and Restorative Yoga), Wednesday Solo Arts Heal (offering stories of health, advocacy, and inspiration), Stephanie's MarshStream on Thursday nights (interview and performance excerpts, moderated by The Marsh Founder/Artistic Director Stephanie Weisman), BINGO! hosted by Josh Kornbluth, and weekend Solo Performance Spotlight featuring live full-length performances. MarshStream also offers performance development classes, a noon series that includes CJ's FitnesSing weekly singing lesson/fitness class, and a Zoomba Room. Content is typically offered at 7:30pm nightly, and mid-day throughout the week via Zoom and YouTube LIVE. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic MarshStream has hosted over 500 LIVE streams, providing some 200 performers a platform to continue developing and producing art.

MarshStream viewers are asked to contribute whatever they can afford. Donations can be made by joining The Marsh's membership program and via a virtual "tip jar" on the website, with funds going to support The Marsh and its artists. For more information, the public may visit www.themarsh.org/marshstream. NOTE: Most performance streams from earlier MarshStream dates are also available on the website for viewing.

In addition to nightly program offerings on MarshStream, The Marsh has also launched Marsh Youth Theater (MYT) MarshStream, classes offered daily and taught by MYT instructors. From Creative Dramatics to Storytelling, Dancing, and more, class types, instructors, and age levels vary for each class. For weekly class schedules and additional information, please visit themarsh.org/mytmarshstream.

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