As part of the O, Miami Poetry Festival, the famous San Francisco born literature and pub crawl series, LitCrawl, comes to Miami for the first time. On Friday, April 25, starting at 6 p.m., it’s the beginning of an event-filled evening of literature combined with your favorite cocktails. What could be better?

LitCrawl is a “choose-your-own-adventure” evening of literary events at South Beach bars. Think of it as a pub crawl with no correct route, just many possibilities, say the organizers. LitCrawl was started in San Francisco in 2006. The concept is simple – a bar crawl with literature – but every crawl in every different city is different.

There are now LitCrawls in London, New York, Austin, Chicago, and many other major cities.

The festivities begin at 6 p.m. at The Betsy South Beach’s B Bar. Novelist Russell Banks and Poet Chase Twichell will read, and LitCrawl staff will distribute maps and schedules for the evening. After that, which LitCrawl adventure participants choose is up to them.
Here is the schedule – for full event descriptions, go to http://litcrawl.org/miami/

6 p.m.
Kick-off with Russell Banks and Chase Twichell
Presented by O, Miami
B Bar at The Betsy
1440 Ocean Drive

6:45 p.m.
Climactic Poetry
Presented by Culture in the City/Famous Last Friday
Miami Beach Cinematheque
1130 Washington Avenue

7 p.m.
CHAIku in the Alley
Presented by Next@19th
Corner of 14th Place and Ocean Court

7:30 p.m.
Poppin’ the Pimple: Sharing Our Awkward Teenage Writing
Presented by Mangrove Literary Journal
Books & Books
927 Lincoln Road
O, Wolfsonian
Presented by Annik Adey-Babinski
The Wolfsonian-FIU
1001 Washington Avenue

8 p.m.
Reading Queer
ArtCenter/South Florida
800 Lincoln Road
The Literary Olympics
Presented by Lip Service
The Carlton
1433 Collins Avenue

9 p.m.
Poem Depot
Presented by Miami Poetry Collective
The Playwright Irish Pub
1265 Washington Avenue
A Poetic Cabaret: The Spoken Soul Poets
Presented by Spoken Soul
Cabaret South Beach
233 12th Street

10 p.m.
Noire
Presented by Rod Deal and Isis Miller
Kill Your Idol
222 Espanola Way

Some of the presenters include:

Reading Queer Founded by Neil de la Flor and Paula Kolek: Reading Queer seeks to establish Miami as a center for queer literature through an annual week-long literary festival, creative writing workshops led by nationally and locally recognized queer writers, a literary salon series and a literary archive.

Lip Service is true stories out loud, created by Andrea Askowitz and Esther Martinez.  At Lit Crawl, Lip Service will stage The Literary Olympics. Everyone is invited to tell a true, personal story. The event will have a host and a panel of judges who will award, First, Second and Third place prizes

Jonathan Rose- Culture in the City Local Poets and Cinematheque theatergoers (selected at random to be readers or audience members) will march around those seated  (who draw "audience" coded letters) reading their poems aloud and in unison. 

Mangrove Literary Journal (undergraduate journal from University of Miami) “Popping the Pimple: Sharing Our Awkward Teenage Writing."  Staff editors and readers along with UM cretive writing professors will share their poems, stories, diary entries,  and much more that they wrote in their teens. Lit crawlers are welcome to bring their own teenage writing to the event to share when the floor is open after the featured readers.

Jenni Person- CHAIku: Participating writers develop three original Haikus that in some way touch on their relationship to Jewish identity. For the performance, each person enters the performance area and finds his or her own space. Then the readings will begin and proceed one by one. As another person’s CHAIku resonates - or doesn’t - participants respond by moving in relation to the reader and how they connect to his or her CHAIku/experience of Jewish identity. The idea behind the constant shifting of readers in the space around each other is to suggest that idea of indeterminate, fluid, non-linear, constantly shifting and evolving, that this cultural identity doesn’t look one singular or binary way.