Chicago poet and Austin resident Janet Kuypers returned to Chicago in the beginning of August in 2023, and was honored with the opportunity reinstate her 2010-2015 “the Café Gallery” at The Gallery Cabaret with a FULL NIGHT of a lengthy open mic and poetry / music features. Once again at The Gallery Cabaret (2020 N. Oakley Ave. in Chicago - one block east of Western Avenue and one block north of Armitage) on Wednesday, August 9^th 2023.

    During the evening, Janet Kuypers started the “Poetry Open Mic at The Gallery Cabaret with feature Janet Kuypers” with a reading of 1 poem from the cc&d magazine v334 6/23 30-year anniversary issue, “From a Devil to an Angel” that also appears in the CyberWit 2023 Janet Kuypers book “Testament” (which is the foundation for her 20243 feature at The Gallery Cabaret this year). In other rounds between open mic poets, Janet Kuypers also read poetry highlighting not only CyberWit books “Testament” and “Shattering the Glass Ceiling”, but also recent Scars Publications book released from cc&d magazine and Down in the Dirt magazine.

    Janet Kuypers during this evening performed her feature “showtitle”, which contained new poetry from the CyberWit 2023 Janet Kuypers book “Testament” — primarily of select poems form Part One (the largest part of this new book), sharing poetry with details and insights about the unraveling of the rights of so many people in the U.S. after the Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, the the beginning of her final week in Chicago highlighting this book and the 1-year anniverssry since the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling — after previous features 6/28/23 with “Fighting for Justice” in Hot Springs, AR, and her 7/2/23 “Beach Poets” poetry feature “Bringing women’s Battles to the Beach”, before her 8/12/23 WXRD Chicago Radio show interview and her Tangible Books bookstore feature reading. (Music in the background during her readings in this feature was original electric guitar background music from John Yotko.)

    Enjoy the video links and poem writing links below for recordings from this live evening, including before the show of individual poems readings, as well as the entire show performance!