Events

Alison facilitates and hosts Well-Versed Words, a free online poetry reading on the second Sunday of the month, at 2:30 p.m. PT/ 5:30 p.m. ET. If you would like to be featured, please message Alison at https://www.facebook.com/Iambicreative or email her at poetrybyalisonhurwitz@gmail.com. 

Our next WVW will be on Sunday, June 14th and will feature poet Laurel Benjamin! Laurel is a San Francisco Bay Area native. She is active with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and is a reader for Common Ground Review. She curates Ekphrastic Writers, a group dedicated to writing and community. Flowers on a Train was a finalist for the Cider Press Review Book Award, and received Honorable Mention with Small Harbor Publishing. She is a winner of the Poet's Corner Ekphrastic Challenge for 2024, she received Honorable Mention for the Ruben Rose Memorial Poetry Competition, and is a winner in many Ekphrastic Review challenges. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.  Publication credits include: Lily Poetry Review, Pirene's Fountain, Cider Press Review, Mom Egg Review, Nixes Mate, Taos Journal of Poetry, Gone Lawn, West Trestle Review, Of the Book Literary Magazine, Deronda Review,  and Rise Up Review, where her work has been recognized. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (2025), The Nature of Our Times: Poems on America's Land, Waters, Wildlife, and Other Natural Wonders (2025), and Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women's Poetry (2006). Lily Poetry Salon has featured her. Laurel holds an MFA from Mills College.