Readings by four women poets will close the season for the Choice Cuts Reading Series at 7:30 p.m. Friday May 16 at the Slaughterhouse Gallery & Studios, Lawrenceville. Featured will be the poets Jan Beatty, Leslie Anne Mcilroy, Kayla Sargeson and Mary Matejevich.

Beatty is the author of three books: Red Sugar, which was published this year; Boneshaker, published in 2002; and Mad River, which was the winner of the 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize.

For the past 15 years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM, which features the work of national writers. Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker and abortion counselor. She worked in maximum-security prisons and was awaitress for 15 years. She directs the creative writing program atCarlow University where she teaches the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and in the MFA program.

Mcilroy was the winner of the 1997 Slipstream Poetry Chapbook Prize, the 1997 Chicago Literary Award and the 2000 Word Press Poetry Prize for her first book, Rare Space. Her poems were most recently published in The Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Pearl. Her second book, Liquid Like This, will be published in July. Mcilroy is a Pittsburgh native where she works as a copywriter, loves her daughter Silas and partner, Don.

Kayla Sargeson's poetry has been published in Critical Point and Voices from the Attic. She has been a member of the Madwoman in the Attic since 2007. She is a line editor for Voices in the Attic, Volume XIV, the 2008 anthology of poetry and fiction by the Madwomen writing workshops. She is a student at Carlow University, majoring in creative and professional writing and minoring in philosophy.

Matejevich is a western Pennsylvania poet as well as a lifelong dancer, peace activist, chocoholic and lover of all the arts. The Sufi poet Rumi is among the writers Matejevich admires along with Sharon Olds, Charles Simic, Pablo Neruda, Vladimir Nabokov and Marianne Moore. She is passionate about organic foods, especially avocados and ice cream –but not together.