Welcome to Poetry at the Lion! All poets and poetry fans are welcome!

Each month, a featured poet will read from their works and shape the evening’s experience. Poetry lovers can stop on their way to eat out or bring a brown bag meal and stay for the whole evening. Light refreshments will be provided.

The featured poet for August is Robert Fernandez.

Robert Fernandez was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1980 and raised in Hollywood, Florida. He is a poet, translator, and visual artist. He is the author of Scarecrow (Wesleyan University Press, 2016), as well as Pink Reef (2013) and We Are Pharaoh (2011), both published by Canarium Books. He co-translated Azure: Poems and Selections from the “Livre” by Stéphane Mallarmé (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), and his poetry has appeared in Bennington Review, Callaloo, Chicago Review, The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, Huizache, Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, Mantis, Melange, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, Thrasher, Transition, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

In the January/February 2024 issue, Poetry featured a full-color spread of Fernandez’s work combining poetry and visual art as part of its series on poetic form, Not Too Hard to Master. His paintings have been exhibited at 1122 Gallery in Portland and featured in Caesura. A chapbook of poems, Las Moradas (arrow as aarow), was released in 2025, and another, Wild Child (b l u s h), is forthcoming in 2026.