The Live Poets Society now meets at the Alliance Française on a regular basis on the last Tuesday of the month. The next event takes place on July 29 and is titled A Moment of Poetry.

Guest speaker will be Liesl Jobson launches her first collection of poetry View from an Escalator which is due to be published shortly with a Community Publishing Project grant from the Centre for the Book.

Liesl Jobson was born in Durban. She is the author of 100 Papers, a collection of prose poems and flash fiction. She is the national editor of Poetry International Web, South Africa, the Johannesburg Editor for BOOK Southern Africa and the managing editor of Mad Hatters' Review. She won the POWA Women's Writing Poetry (2005), the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award (2005) and the Faye Goldie Award (2006).

As haiku is to poetry, so flash fiction is to the short story: condensed, tight, tiny. Modern short stories come by a range of names: microfiction, vignette, postcard fiction, palm-of-the-hand stories and smoke-long fiction. When the cigarette is smoked, the story is done; with the camera's flash, the image is snatched. Every word counts, operating at a number of levels. The magic of flash fiction lies in its brevity and essence and succeeds best when the reader recognizes that which is implied and completes the text. The miniatures found in 100 Papers are gleaned from the experiences of being a police officer and a psychic, an orchestral bassoonist and a weekend mother. Parrots and gossips, eccentrics and vinegary teens people the stories in this collection.

The Live Poets Society meeting takes place on July 29 from 18h00 to 20h00 at the Alliance Française de Durban at 22 Sutton Crescent, Morningside. Admission is free and patrons are invited to come earlier, the cash bar is open at 17h30. More information on 031 312 9582.