By Nancy Lynée Woo

From: Patreon

On Monday, April 9, 2018, the poetry community said a sad yet fond farewell to one of the strongest poetry readings in Long Beach—Cadence Collective—and with it one of the biggest poetry hearts of our beloved city—G. Murray Thomas.

It’s so very human to feel sad when good things end—and Cadence Collective has been one of the best things. It feels like forever ago now when, one day in the summer of 2013, a bright-eyed Sarah Thursday (just recently christened as her poet self) bounced into the Poetry Lab in downtown Long Beach, pronouncing that she was going to start a poetry website to publish Long Beach poets, and she was going to call it Cadence Collective.

We had known each other for less than a couple of months at that point, but I had already fallen into friendship love with this passionate, fiery woman, so I had little doubt that what she declared would come to pass.

Little did I know that that website (which sure enough published a poem a day from local poets) would go on to become Sarah’s beloved local poetry press, Sadie Girl, putting dozens of local poets into print, and a monthly reading series—the Cadence Collective Second Monday Poetry Party—when Sarah joined forces with the one and only G. Murray Thomas.

These two have been hosting a monthly Cadence reading since 2014, I believe, and this reading has brought so many poets together, and more than that, out of their shells and into the spotlight. I am one of those poets and I am so unbelievably grateful to have been so gracefully and effortlessly accepted by my community of poets. Read Rest of Article Here