Sept 9, 2014 Poet X. J. Kennedy 5PM

 

 

 

 

X.J. Kennedy

(known to his friends as Joe) was born in Dover, N. J., on August 21, 1929, shortly before the crash of the stock market. Irked by the hardship of having the name of Joseph Kennedy, he stuck the X on and has been stuck with it ever since.
Kennedy grew up in Dover, went to Seton Hall (B.Sc. ’50) and Columbia (M.A., ’51), then spent four years in the Navy as an enlisted journalist, serving aboard destroyers. He studied at the Sorbonne in 1955-56, then devoted the next six years to failing to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. But he did meet Dorothy there.
He has taught English at Michigan, at the Woman’s College of the U. of North Carolina (now UNC Greensboro), and from 1963 through 1978 at Tufts, with visiting sojourns at Wellesley, U. of California Irvine, and the U. of Leeds. In 1978, he became a free-lance writer.
Recognitions include the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets (for his first book, Nude Descending a Staircase in 1961), the Los Angeles Book Award for poetry (for Cross Ties: Selected Poems, 1985), the Aiken-Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry (given by the University of the South and The Sewanee Review), Guggenheim and National Arts Council fellowships, the first Michael Braude Award for light verse (given by the American Academy & Institute of Arts & Letters to a poet of any nation), the Shelley Memorial Award, the Golden Rose of the New England Poetry Club, honorary degrees from Lawrence and Adelphi universities and Westfield State College, the National Council of Teachers of English Year 2000 Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry, and in 2004 the Poets’ Prize (for The Lords of Misrule: Poems 1992-2002). In spring 2009 the Poetry Society of America gave him the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime service to poetry.
The Kennedys have five grown children and six grandchildren. They now live in Lexington, Mass., in a house half century-old and half new.

Aug 19 5PM Sam Cornish

Poet Sam Cornish

                                            see the show live at http://scatvsomerville.org

 Sam Cornish

b. 1935

http://www.samcornish.com/

Born in Baltimore in 1935, poet Sam Cornish was educated at Goddard College and Northwestern University. Associated with the Black Arts Movement, Cornish incorporates history and family and takes on topics such as race and class in his short-lined poems. He is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Dead Beats (2011), An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems (2008), Songs of Jubilee: New and Selected Poems 1969–1983 (1986), and Generations (1971). A theatrical production of An Apron Full of Beans was presented in Boston in 2012.

Cornish wrote the children’s books Your Hand in Mine (1970) and Grandmother’s Pictures (1967) and co-edited the anthology Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto (1969). With Hugh Fox, he co-edited The Living Underground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1969). Cornish’s work has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Black Fire (1968), The New Black Poetry (1969), American Literary Anthology (1970), and The Poetry of Black America (1973).

Cornish’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Somerville Arts/Ibbetson Press Lifetime Achievement Award, and a grant from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts.

Poet laureate of Boston since 2008, Cornish has taught at Emerson College and for a number of years ran a bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts. He also ran the small press Beanbag Press. He lives in Boston.

Aug 5, 2014 Poet Joanne Reynolds

Joanne DeSimone Reynolds has published poems in such journals

as Salamander, Ibbetson Street Press, Wilderness House Literary Review,

and Sanctuary Magazine. A graduate of Boston University, she is a member

of the Concord Poetry Center. She writes reviews for Boston Area Small Press,

and lives in Scituate, Massachusetts. Her chapbook Comes a Blossom

was just published by Main Street Rag.