Poet, Publisher, Playwright Diana Saenz March 6 2007

My Guest March 6 2007 5PM:

Diana Saenz was born in Los Angeles, California. She lived for a time with her grandparents in Fresno, California. She recounts her memories of Central California as among her most powerful memories, specifically recalling of the scent of Oleanders that proliferated in her grandparents' neighborhood, in Fresno.

Diana Saenz is a playwright and poet who has been writing for 35 years. Her fifteen plays have been produced in California, Massachusetts, Texas and Maine. She has written three books of poetry, and numerous articles and short stories. Saenz founded "The Boston Poet," an event calendar for poets.

Diana later founded the online journal http://www.bostonpoet.com and the Boston Poet Journal.

Feb 27 5 PM Poet Alfred Nicol author of "Winter Light"

Alfred Nicol worked in the printing industry for twenty years after graduating from Dartmouth College, where he received the Academy of American Poets Prize. He now lives in Amesbury, Massachusetts and is a member of the Powow River Poets. He edited the Powow River Anthology, published by Ocean Publishing in 2006, and was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light, published by The University of Evansville Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Formalist, Measure, Commonweal, Verse Daily, The New England Review, Atlanta Review, and other journals. Several of his poems have been anthologized in Contemporary Poetry of New England, Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, and Kiss and Part. The last of nine installments of his long poem, “Persnickety Ichabod’s Rhyming Diary” will appear in Light Quarterly, Vol. 52.


"Nicol is much more than a poet's poet; he is also a reader's poet, and his work, though dazzling, is not intended to simply dazzle but to convey, with charm and profundity, the experiences of our common life." -- Rhina P. Espaillat

"How different an aesthetic Nicol shows in the splendid Winter Light, as canny and moving a formalist collection as I have seen in years." -- Sydney Lea

"On every page Nicol exhibits a genuine largeness of spirit and grace of mind. His techniques are well-honed. This is certainly among the finest new volumes of poetry I have read in years." -- Jay Parini

Feb 13 2007 My guest will be John Hodgen

My guest Feb. 13 5PM will be poet John Hodgen. Hodgen will be reading from his new book, Grace.Winner of the 2005 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Hodgen, who teaches writing at Assumption College in Worcester, has two other prize-winning books, and his poems, according to Ha Jin, National Book Award winner and professor at Boston University, contain "a voice that speaks directly from the heart."His publications include the anthologies Witness and Wait: Thirteen Poets From New England and Something and We Teach Them All: Teachers Writing About Diversity. His other honors include the Grolier Prize in Poetry in 1980 and an Arvon Foundation Award (Kensington, England) in 1981.