Francesca Kritikos, Léon Pradeau, Alex J. Cope, Phoebe Kaufman, Chelsea Tadeyeske, Jack Klika

media release: A traveling tour of poets is coming to Room! The Sidekicks Tour: Madison stop will have readings from the following poets: Francesca Kritikos, Léon Pradeau, Alex J. Cope, Phoebe Kaufman, Chelsea Tadeyeske, and Jack Klika.

This is an in-person event at A Room of One's Own.

About the Poets

Francesca Kritikos is the author of the poetry collections The season of lilacs is monstrous (forthcoming Blush Lit, 2025), SWEET BLOODY SALTY CLEAN (Feral Dove, 2023) and Exercise in Desire (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2022), as well as the chapbooks In the Bed of Sickness (Pitymilk Press, 2023) and Animals Don't Go To Hell (Bottlecap Press, 2021). Her works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published in English, French and Greek. She is the founder and editor in chief of SARKA, a journal and publisher focused on works of the flesh.

Léon Pradeau is a poet and translator. He lives between Paris and Chicago, editing Transat', a journal of poetry and poetics in French and English. He is the author of snow of snow (Bottlecap Press, 2024); vaisseau instantané/instant shipping (Les murmurations, 2024), and "This is it" (Antiphony, 2025). He writes in French and English—imperfectly in both, fully embracing the weirdness of living between languages.

Alex J. Cope is a poet and translator based in Chicago. Previously, they lived in Paris, where they organized a multilingual queer and feminist reading series out of a dyke bar.  They currently co-organize a community writing workshop out of the PO Box Collective as part of its monthly Poetry Series. Work from their manuscript soft like a spider has appeared in publications such as Sixty Inches from Center, The Rumpus, Pilot Press London, and Hooligan Magazine.

Phoebe Kaufman is a Chicago-based writer and editor. Her work can be found in Forever Magazine, the Poetry Project’s website, and anthologized in Kardashians: A Critical Anthology (Routledge, 2024). Realerratics: Essays on Fantasy, Memory, and Reality TV (Deluge Books, 2026) is her first book. She edits books for Deluge.

Chelsea Tadeyeske is a poet and bookmaker from Milwaukee, WI where she co-edits pitymilk press and curates poetry readings in her apartment, The Bell Tower. She is the author of several chapbooks including If You Bend It Backwards Nothing Really Happens (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2017), Princess Diana (Bathmatics, 2019), Island Weather (pitymilk press, 2022) and Orange Poems (pitymilk press, 2024). She is a Virgo sun, Libra rising and Aquarius moon born in the year of the snake. Follow her @pity_milk on IG or visit chelseatadeyeske.wordpress.com.

Jack is from Milwaukee. He writes poems.