Inky Fingers Open Mic, featuring Ken Arkind and Jon Sands The Third Door, Lothian Street, Edinburgh 28th February, 8 - 11pm, FREE This month, we’re incredibly excited to be featuring two top US poets, KEN ARKIND and JON SANDS, as part of their UK tour. Ken Arkind is a National Poetry Slam Champion, Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion and full time touring artist who has performed across the US, been publishedin numerous anthologies, and featured in HBO, CBS, NBC and Borders.com’s Open Door Poetry series. Jon Sands is a full-time teaching & performing artist. His first full collection of poems, The New Clean, was released in 2011 from Write Bloody Publishing. Jon is currently the Director of Poetry Education at the Positive Health Project. The Inky Fingers Open Mic takes place on the fourth Tuesday of the month, from 8-11pm. It’s free to come and free for anyone to perform, regardless of style, experience, or identity. We want to hear from everybody, and we want to support everybody in performing for a friendly audience. We want your poems, your rants, your ballads, your short stories, your diaries, your experimental texts, your heart, your mind, your body. We want the essay on your summer holidays you wrote when you were four, your adolescent haiku, and extracts from your eventually-to-be-completed epic fantasy quadrilogy. We want to hear your best new work as well. And we want people to care about the way words are performed. As well as the open mic, each night features top performers from the UK and further afield: we bring you the best in poetry, storytelling, fiction, and everything else that involves putting beautiful words in a beautiful order! Spaces to perform are limited, so please email inkyfingersedinburgh@gmail.com to reserve a space.