Genesee Reading Series: Lu Highsmith & Nick Eckerson

Now in its 36th year, the Genesee Reading Series is a smorgasbord for your literary palate. Come every month on the second Tuesday, and by the end of the year, you will have feasted on the work of 24 regional authors (some prominent, some emerging; writers of fiction, poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, memoir). It’s up close and personal in the intimate Performance Space upstairs & stay afterward and talk to the authors while eating cookies. $3 for members, $6 for the general public.

Rochester, NY native Lu Highsmith is a writer, publisher, promoter and spoken artist. Whatever form she chooses is always reflective of her passion for spirituality, sensuality, and social consciousness. Lu self-published two poetry books, Vicissitudes: The Ups and Downs of Life, in 2008, and Ascension into Love in 2010. Mood Makers Bookstore named her a featured poet in Poetry On the Wall in 2006, and her poem “From Whence We Came” was named Poem of Distinction. Her spoken word can be heard on Jimmie Highsmith Jr.’s 2009 CD, entitled “Jacquin” , his Grammy-nominated 2011 “Anthology of Sound” CD and Lu’s very-own spoken word CD, “Ascension”, released by Variance Records in late 2012.

    For the past 10 years, she has been co-host of one of the longest consecutively-running Open Mic’s in Rochester, “Flowetic Rhythms,” at Gallery one. She founded Roc Bottom Slam Poetry Team and is the founder of the Roc Poetry Collective. Lu was  co-founder of CSWA (Culture Starts With Art) Poets who produced the “Erotic Nights” series at Equal Grounds and ” Womonstock” at Ellison Park in 2010. Lu is currently a member of the dynamic writing consortium “We All Write,” and appeared in the 2017 Fringe Festival with her fellow writers.

    Nicolas Eckerson is an always-aspiring poet, located and inspired by his home of Rochester, NY, and its surrounding suburb-life. What Walt Whitman felt upon reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early call for an essentially American poet is one of many reasons Nick wakes up in the morning with an open notebook beside him and goes to sleep the same way. Favorite poets include Shakespeare, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Lucille Clifton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kim Adonizzio, Langston Hughes, Joy Harjo, Wordsworth and many others.  
    He has been published in and helped edit RIT’s arts magazine Signatures, and his poems have also appeared in Big Bridge Magazine. Nicolas contributed poems to the thematic Joe Poems Anthologies, ‘Mo Joe and other collections revolving around his mentor, prof and friend John Roche’s character Joe The Poet. He stays active by attending the annual Cloudburst Council hosted by publishers, poets and writers groups from across the northeast at Writers and Books’s Gell Center in Naples. He also attends the occasional open mic and, most importantly, keeps his radar sharp in search of artistic growth across the arts everywhere today.