First Sunday Prose — June 2026

Celebrate Pride Month with the Writers Guild!  Join us at the Juniper Art Gallery on Sunday, June 7 at 4pm. Open mic to follow the featured readers.  Come early for a drink or snack; shop for gifts and art!  Celebrate Pride, celebrate community.  Everyone is welcome.

WESTLEY PENLAND is a spoken word poet originally from Florida, now residing in Spencer, IN. He writes about life’s most rewarding and disappointing moments and all the weird stuff in between. His debut poetry chapbook, Confirmation of Life (Alien Buddha Press, 2024), tells of his struggles surviving conversion therapy up to his coming to terms with being a transgender man. He and his partner currently run the Natural Poet Society, a group of poets dedicated to reading poetry in the natural world, specifically in caves. 

MOLLY GLEESON writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. She had a late start, beginning to write only in her late thirties while living in China. After returning from teaching overseas, Molly began writing more seriously and is grateful for her writing communities, including Women Writing for (a) Change Bloomington, and the Writers Guild at Bloomington. In January, her essay “Two Sides of the Same Coin” was published in Post Road Magazine, and her short story is forthcoming in a Wordrunner eChapbooks anthology whose theme is “Endings.” In 2020, she won Grand Prize in the Midnight Oil Magazine’s short story contest, and her winning entry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2024, she hosted a local author book fair for the Writers Guild at Bloomington, and in 2025, and brought best-selling author Aminatta Forna to Bloomington for a talk at the Monroe County Public Library.