The Madtown Poetry Open Mic w/ featured reader Matt Cook

Art in the cafe...

Laurel Statz


"The Spectator"


December 2025



Laurel Statz is a painter and Madison area native. Her work, while figurative, is influenced by abstraction and minimalism. The paintings often have a quick and instinctual nature, capturing just what’s needed. While she often times herself to eliminate extra details and over-precision, she has ventured into more detailed works as well. Laurel does not attach narrative to her pieces. Rather, she thinks of them like a journaling process for her scatter-brained psyche. The figures in the pieces are meant to be processing tools for the artist and the viewer. She hopes that seeing these figures helps the...
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Friday, November 3, 2017
8:00 pm

Matt Cook is the author of five books of poetry, including his newest collection, Irksome Particulars (Publishing Genius Press). His poems have appeared in The Evergreen Review, The Hawaii Review, Faultline, and other journals. His work has been anthologized in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, The United States of Poetry, and in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places. He is the former poet laureate of Milwaukee, where he currently resides.

The Madtown Poetry Open Mic, hosted by Ron Czerwien at Mother Fool's Coffeehouse, welcomes all forms of poetry. Readers in the open mic are invited to read their original work for up to five minutes.

Sign up starts at 7:30pm and the event begins at 8:00pm.

Open Mic