On Wednesday August 18th at Lix and Kix, Pittsburgh poets Nikki Allen & Renée Alberts bring their Cut & Run tour to Lakewood, Cleveland's beloved Kisha Nicole Foster gives a farewell performance, and Steve Abbott brings poetic fire from Columbus.

Lix and Kix offers featured poets, music, open mic, coffee, beer, art and assorted grooviness the third Wednesday of each month (7 p.m.) at Bela Dubby Art Gallery & Beer Cafe, 13321 Madison Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio, hosted by Dianne Borsenik and John "Jesus Crisis" Burroughs.

Cleveland's own Kisha Nicole Foster, "Poet of the People," has been a member of the Cleveland Classic slam team and was honored in 2006 by Writers & Their Friends as one of the top 25 writers in Cleveland. Her work was recently anthologized in Cleveland Poetry Scenes (Bottom Dog Press, 2008). Kisha will be leaving the Cleveland area soon, and we are happy to feature her this second time before she does.

Renée Alberts listens to rivers and shortwave radio to create poetry, collage, sound and photography. Her poetry collection, No Water, came out in 2009, and her work has appeared in The New Yinzer, Encyclopedia Destructica, Pittsburgh City Paper, and Subtletea. She has given dozens of readings, including on WYEP’s Prosody, WRCT's A Live Show, and as a 2001 and 2004 member of the Steel City Slam Team. She organizes numerous poetry and music events, including the CLP Sunday Poetry & Reading Series, for which she edited Natural Language: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh Sunday Poetry and Reading Series Anthology. She posts writing and art at www.animalprayer.com.

Nikki Allen is a 29 year old writer living in Pittsburgh. She’s been getting on stages for over 11 years and scribbling poems on homework, in notebooks and all over cocktail napkins for most of her life. She is the author of numerous chapbooks, including My Darling Since, Gutter of Eden, and Quite Like Yes. She competed on national poetry slam teams in Dayton and Pittsburgh from 2001 to 2003. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yinzer, Crash, Open Thread Regional Review Vol. 2, and Encyclopedia Destructica. She’s also performed with beatboxers, bucket drums and the Incredibly Thin Collective. She uses clothes pins for hair barrettes and lives to witness others doing what they love. Her work can be found online at honeydunce.com.

Steve Abbott is a native of central Ohio and was a co-founder and writer for the Columbus Free Press. He has been a courtroom bailiff, a private investigator, and director of communications for a social service agency. He was a founding member of The Poetry Forum at Larry’s, which has sponsored Monday night readings at Larry’s Bar in Columbus since 1984. An associate editor of Pudding Magazine: The International Journal of Applied Poetry, Steve is also faculty advisor for Spring Street, the literary and arts journal at Columbus State Community College, where he is a tenured full professor and lead instructor of creative writing, teaches composition and creative writing, and hosts a twice-quarterly Open Mic Coffeehouse. He was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry in 1993 and an OAC residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1994. His poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Wind, Birmingham Poetry Review, and The Heartlands Today as well as the anthologies Prayers to Protest: Poems That Center and Bless Us (Pudding House Publications, 1998) and Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology (Bottom Dog Press, 1996). His history of the Columbus Free Press appeared in Voices from the Underground: Insider Histories of the Vietnam-Era Underground Press (Mica Press, 1991), which will be appear in an updated edition late in 2008. His chapbook A Short History of the Word was published in 1996, and his collection Greatest Hits, 1982-2003 was released in 2006. With Columbus poets Rose M. Smith and Connie Everett, he edited Cap City Poets, an anthology of Columbus and central Ohio poets, available from Pudding House.