Flyleaf Second Sunday Poetry Series: Al Maginnes and Gideon Young

Join us for our Monthly Poetry series, an afternoon of poetic readings. Featured poets will each read for 20 minutes, followed by a short break to sign books, then an open mic. Please sign up by 2:30 pm, and limit your reading to one poem, one page. Hope to see you there!

Al Maginnes’s most recent poetry collection is a sequence of blank-verse sonnets called Second Line (Redhawk Publications 2025). He is the author of fourteen previous collections, most recently Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems (Redhawk 2023). His poems have been published widely over the last 40 years.  He is retired from teaching and lives in Raleigh. Of his poems, Ron Rash has said “To read the poems of Al Maginnes is to encounter an acrobat of consciousness. His poems’ swerves and leaps delight and amaze, but most of all they sound the depths of the human heart.”

Gideon Young is a member of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective. His debut chapbook Teacher was the winner of the 2025 Aquarius Press/Willow Books Poetry Chapbook Competition (2026) and his debut haiku collection my hands full of light was published by Backbone Press (2021). Gideon is co-author of One Window’s Light: A Collection of Haiku, published by Unicorn Press (2017), winner of the Haiku Society of America Merit Award for Best Anthology, and a new collaborative anthology from Unicorn Press—Griots: Keepers of the Story; A Collection of Haibun (2026). A former Title 1 elementary school teacher, Gideon is a Fellow for A Schools of North Carolina and a North Carolina Poetry Society Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet. He lives in Chapel Hill. Discover more at www.gideonyoung.com.