The story below is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photo above: Members of the Post-Apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-Apocalyptic World. ©Courtesy of Maggie Dillow.
In downtown coffee shops and breweries, audiences are invited to read, write and clap along in celebration of the written word.
Each poet takes a turn at the microphone. One is surprisingly dressed in a nun’s habit. After she concludes reading her piece, another poet, without getting up from their chair, holds a sign to the crowd reading “Applause.” The audience dutifully complies. These renegade artists are the Post-Apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-Apocalyptic World, a poetry-slash-performance-art group in Roanoke — just one of the many happenings in Roanoke’s surprisingly vibrant underground literary scene.
Maggie Dillow, aka “Saint Margaret” in nun’s garb, says her group responds to the question: “What would you say to the world as a poet from the future to the world before the future, in which the most valuable form of currency is poetry?”
Ever since Annie Dillard put pen to paper at Tinker Creek over 50 years ago, Roanoke has attracted writers, poets and dreamers like these.
At Ursula’s Café, a hip pay-what-you-can eatery on Jefferson Street, dozens of denizens are nose-deep in a sea of books. Seated quietly at circular tables, this might look like a room full of strangers, but this is actually the Silent Book Club, a weekly gathering of “between 30 and 50 people” who come together just to read, says group founder Michelle Narramore. “We’ve had teenagers up through retirees, empty nesters, kind of the whole gambit. We have non-fiction readers, fiction readers, a little bit of everything.”
If your idea of book-reading leans more chaotic — say, taking a black sharpie to its inner pages — then you’re also in luck, because blackout poetry is all the rage in Roanoke. Kross, a Black queer poet who recently led a blackout poetry workshop at a downtown brewery on Salem Avenue, says “a lot of people doubt their ability to do poetry, but blackout poetry is a good starting point to show anybody they can do it.”
Meanwhile, you might catch Kross MC-ing the open-mic at Ursula’s or reading their own work at any of the other open-mic nights in town. They particularly praise Poems & Coffee, a group centering “Black and People of Color poets” that recently brought their spoken-word poetry to the Fishburn Mansion.
“I don’t think that poetry can save the world,” remarks Dillow, the poetic nun, “but I do think that the action of making poetry can help build a better one.”
Want to join the movement? Follow the Post-Apocalyptic Poets for a Pre-Apocalyptic World on Instagram @postapocalyptic_poets, learn more about upcoming readings at Ursula’s Café at ursulascafe.org or find your people through the Roanoke chapter of the Silent Book Club on Facebook. For spoken-word showcases centering Black and POC poets, don’t miss Poems & Coffee, also on Instagram @poems.coffee.va.
The story above is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
