About

I am currently working on getting the functionality of this site working smoothly and so I haven't had much chance to put together a great About page, but I'll tell you a few things until I do.

This site is a passion project. Many years ago when I was in my late teens and growing increasingly interested in poetry, I somehow became aware of the NYC Poetry Calendar. This was well before the age of the internet and I don't know how people found out about readings without it. Maybe they got postcards in the mail or something.

The NYC Poetry Calendar was a broadside printed up on colorful paper that listed in very small type just about every reading, poetry-related event and open mic in New York City for a given month. And it was free. I don't know how they managed, but the people that ran the NYC Poetry Calendar somehow managed to distribute copies to bookstores and cafes and known poetry haunts throughout the city.

It existed for many years and then at some point the internet happened and it seemed to disappear. I believe that it tried previously to exist as an online resource but that too seemed to fade out at some point. When I have more concrete details on all of this I will share them here.

But that does sort of bring us to the present moment, to the site that you are looking at right now. About fifteen years ago I decided to step back and take a breather from the world of poetry, or at least the world of poetry as it exists here in NYC. But about a year ago I decided that I wanted to come up for air and see what was going on. But fifteen years is a long time in New York and many things had changed. Readings didn’t all happen at the same places and some of the places where readings were happening had changed how they operated. Unless I heard about a reading from a friend I would have no way of knowing it was happening. What if I was a sixteen-year-old and wanted to know what was happening and where and when?

The thing is, I have made my living as a software engineer for most of my adult life, and I realized I could quite easily get something up and running that could provide this service that I had been so grateful for and which I also now needed in my life again! And so that’s what I’ve set out to do.

David Cameron is a poet and a software engineer living in Brooklyn, NY.