May 15, 2012: Debra Spark author of Pretty Girl

Debra Spark is author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. She edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. Her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing.
The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, will be published in 2012 by Four Way Books.



Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

May 8, 2012 Jessica Treadway

Biography


Jessica Treadway is the author of Please Come Back To Me, a collection of short stories published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2010 as winner of the 2009 Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction.



Jessica Treadway's previous books are Absent Without Leave, a collection of stories (Delphinium Books/​Simon & Schuster, 1992), and And Give You Peace, a novel (Graywolf Press, 2001). Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Five Points, and other journals, and has been cited in The Best American Short Stories anthology.



A native of Albany, New York, she received her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany before working as a news and feature reporter for United Press International. After moving to Boston to study for her master’s degree in the creative writing program at Boston University, she held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and taught at Tufts University before joining the faculty at Emerson College in Boston, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing.



In addition to her fiction, she has published essays and book reviews for publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and Glamour. She wrote the libretto for composer Ellen Bender’s opera of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and served as literary co-translator of “A Crowning Experience” by Kostiantyn Moskalets in From Three Worlds: New Writing From the Ukraine.



Jessica Treadway has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A former member of the Board of Directors of PEN-New England, where she served as co-chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, she lives in Lexington, Mass. with her husband, Philip Holland.

April 3, 2012 Poet Zvi A. Sesling

Poet Zvi A. Sesling discusses his  poetry, and other aspects of his diverse poetic life...

Publications and Prizes

Journals:

Asphodel, Chiron Review, Ibbetson 21, Illya's Honey, Mastodon Dentist, Midstream,Mobius-The Poetry Magazine, New Delta Review, Poetica, Saranac Review, Timber Creek Review, Touchstone Review, Tower Poetry, Voices Israel

Prizes:

2008 - New England PEN "Discovery" reading, selected by Sam Cornish, Poet Laureate of Boston MA 2007 - First Place, Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition 2004 - Third Place, Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition

Zvi A. Sesling Resume

Personal Favorites

What I'm Reading Now:

 Ballistics by Billy Collins, Apron Full Of Beans by Sam Cornish, Man In The Booth In The Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder, White Pine by Mary Oliver, The Maine Poets edited by by Wesley McNair

Favorite Authors:

Wislawa Szymborska Ted Kooser Billy Collins Charles Simic Yehuda Amichai Sam Cornish

March 13 2012 5PM Poet, Novelist: Joe Torra

SOMERVILLE WRITER JOE TORRA: A Man who gives it to you straight--with no chaser.

By Doug Holder

" I think poets and artists often take themselves too seriously. I mean everybody is important in some way. Hey--my plumber is more important to me than most poets at any given time. When my pipes are clogged--and I got to go...who am I gonna call? We all have our god given talents..." --Joe Torra

I have always admired Joe Torra, a neighbor of mine in Somerville Mass. He is a self-described "working class" poet, and he is one of the least affected,and talented writers I know. He shoots from the hip, and at times makes you feel like your fly is down. And it's good for you- keeps you honest. Years ago he started his own small press, worked on his critically praised poetry and fiction while making a living as a waiter and a substitute teacher, as well as being a mentor for many an upcoming poet and writer.

For the past 9 years he has taught Creative Writing at U/MASS Boston. I have reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed many of Torra's books and poetry collections, and I have had an opportunity to interview him in the past. Torra has a new trilogy of his novels coming out as well as a new poetry collection. So while there was a break from my teaching duties I decided to meet with him at the Bloc 11 Cafe on a decidedly cold winter's morning.

Doug Holder: You grew up in Medford, and have lived in Somerville for a long time. Medford and Somerville are right next to each other but there is a decidedly different sensibility to each of these towns.

Joe Torra: We have lived here for 30 years. Somerville wasn't the "Paris of New England" 30 years ago. It was called--pardon the expression "Slummerville." Things started to change in the 1990's when Rent Control ended in Cambridge and all these artists moved in for cheaper rent. There were very few small presses and artists here before this. But I do think we take our self much to seriously as an artsy community now. We think we are "so special." It is a turn off to me. But this happens with gentrification--the old timers are pushed out, the artists come in and eventually they are pushed out. I think we are more the "Brooklyn of New England" than the "Paris." (Laugh)

Doug Holder: In some ways our lives parallel each other. We both have had or have small presses. Yours was named "lift." You worked as a waiter, and I worked as a mental health worker, and when we both hit our 50's we started teaching college. Would you say we went through the writing school of hard knocks?

Joe Torra: I call what we did living life. It was a great experience being a waiter, and it gave me time to write. Any life the artist has is the right life--rich or poor- who cares? What I didn't like about being a waiter was that people couldn't believe you were a good writer if your worked in a restaurant. I left this work when I turned 50--it was hard on the body-and I was getting tired. You can burn out on anything if you do it long enough.

Doug Holder: Tell me about your "My Ground Trilogy" that is coming out this spring. It is compilation of three novels you wrote " Gas Station," "Tony Luongo," and "My Ground."

Joe Torra: Yes--they are loosely connected at best. The only one that was published in the States was "Gas Station." The other books were published by Gollancz in England. PFP Publishing is publishing the trilogy. Much of the work is informed by Somerville. "Tony Luongo" is about a Somerville born and bred salesman. In "My Ground" the city is called Winter Hill- a section of Somerville. I couldn't have written these books without living here.

Doug Holder: You are also connected to Bill Corbett's Pressed Wafer Press.

Joe Torra: I am a founding member of Pressed Wafer-it was started by Bill Corbett. It was named after a book by John Wieners. In 1999 Bill approached me about working with the Press and I was looking to publish poets, their chapbooks, etc...

Speaking of Wieners--I think he was overlooked. Robert Lowell was known as the "mad genius" because of his patrician background. Wieners was a working class guy; so he was just known as plain crazy. Very much a class thing.

Doug Holder: You adopted two children from China. You have written about your experiences there. What attracts you to this country?

Joe Torra: The longevity of the civilization--the philosophy-( Daoism in particular), the poets Li Po, and Tu Fu to name just a couple.

Doug Holder: How has teaching at U/Mass been for you?

Joe Torra: I like it. I love the students. When we share excitement with writing that is a great thing. You have to make sure you make time for your own writing. I am older now so I am not quite as prolific as I was years ago--I used to churn books out!

Doug Holder: Getting back to your years as a waiter. Would you say restaurants were a sort of way-station for creative people?

Joe Torra: It was for me. I always worked with interesting people. People who were out in the world. I met so many painters, musicians, and writers. I met people who walked across Europe, etc.. I mean when the help had their meal before the shift the conversation was about what book they read, what concert they went to--what were they writing, etc... Sixty to 70% of folks who worked there were in the arts. A nice place to be.




""Who would ever have thought we'd see a black president? I remember as a boy watching riots on television. Police chasing black protesters with dogs. Power hoses dispersing crowds of black people. My father said that Martin Luther King was only good for starting riots then running away. Where did those white people go? The ones who were burning crosses, and bombing churches, and killing young black men? Many of them are probably still here, collecting social security now. And their children live on." (From Torra's novel " What's So Funny?)

*** For more info about Torra go to joetorra.com

March 6, 2012 Rosie Rosenzweig Scholar, Playwright, Poet

Rosie Rosenzweig

Rosenzweig’s early poetry was anthologized in the first gender-friendly American Hebrew prayer book as well as in various feminist anthologies. As the founder of the Jewish Poetry Festival in Sudbury Massachusetts, she hosted outstanding luminaries like the former the poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Her more current poetry is being collected in a work-in-progress.

Rosenzweig’s interpretations of Biblical women appear in Reading Between the Lines, All the Women Followed Her, and Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women. Her essays have appeared in Ethical Wills, Making the Jewish Journey from Mid-life through the Elder Years, and the Foreword. Her travel memoir, A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la describes the Jewish Buddhist World of meditation.

Women’s Intergenerational issues have been a focus of her work and a recently completed a play, “Myths and Ms.” At Brandeis for almost a decade, she has been interviewing artists in various media and hosting a yearly panel at the Brandeis Rose Art Museum on the creative process in an effort to understand the psychological and spiritual state of consciousness present at the moment of creation. Defining how creativity can transform the artist, she has currently coined a term called MotherArtTM.
Current Projects

I am writing a book to define the process of creativity based on ten years of interviews with women artists. My recent journal article demonstratives the transformative affects of the creative process. Presently a preliminary book proposal will help to develop and define the experience and sources of creativity.
Representative Publications

Rosenzweig, Rosie. “MotherArtTM and Maternal Health: Transformation from Grief To Compassion.” Journal of the Association for Research in Mothering. York University, Toronto, Canada. Volume 11. Number 1. (2009): 224–238.

Rosenzweig, Rosie. “Post-triumphalism and the New Haskalah.” in New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, 397–403. Woodstock Vermont: Jewish Lights Publications, 2009.

Feb 28, 2012 Poet Bernard Horn

Bernard Horn’s most recent book of poetry, Our Daily Words, was selected as a “Must Read” book and a finalist for the 2011 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. About a quarter of the poems in the book concern Israel and were written during the nine months the author spent there in 2001, teaching at Haifa University. Winner of a Fulbright and five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Horn’s poems and translations of Israel’s premier poet, Yehuda Amichai, have appeared in The New Yorker, The Manhattan Review, The Mississippi Review, Moment Magazine, and other publications. After teaching in the English Department at Northern Essex Community College for 13 years, Bernie moved on to his present position as Professor of English at Framingham State College, where he received the 2010 Distinguished Faculty Award. On Wednesday, November 16th, at 7:00 p.m., Bernard Horn will present, “Poetry & Terror: The Times & Life of a Family Man.” The program will include the author’s reflections on cross-cultural interrelationships – both in the challenges of translating Yehuda Amichai’s work and in his own poetry. He also will discuss how the activity of translating and the reality of history, in the form of terrorism, impact his writing process, which is grounded in his identity, not as an isolated individual, but as a member of a family and a first generation American.

Feb 7, 2012 Poets January Gil O'Neil/ Jennifer Jean

January Gil O'Neil Executive Director, Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Professor, Salem State University. Author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press 2009) and the forthcoming Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press 2014)! Trying to celebrate the extraordinay in the ordinary every day.

Jennifer Jean is the author of three poetry collections: The Archivist (Big Table Publishing); the multi-media venture: Fishwife (Whale Sound Press); and, In the War (Big Table Publishing). As well, she’s released, with composer Sarah Eide, a collaborative CD called Fishwife Tales which is comprised of art songs, recitations and rock ballads. It can be purchased at CDbaby and on iTunes. Her poetry, essays, literary interviews, and reviews have been published in numerous journals; her poem "The Women" was anthologized in Linebreak's inaugural anthology Two Weeks; her poem "Fishwife with Child," as set to music by Sarah Eide, won the 2011 Curtain Up! Prize; as well, she's received an Agnes Butler Award from the Academy of American Poets, and her long poem, The Legend of Liban the Merrow, was a finalist for the 2010 Firewheel Chapbook Award. Jennifer is a feature writer for the arts and lifestyle magazine Art Throb, an active member of the committee producing the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and she teaches writing and literature at Salem State University and Endicott College.

Jan 10, 2012 Poet Linda Larson

Linda Larson was born and educated in the Midwest and spent childhood vacations and more than a decade of her adult life in Madison County, Mississippi. While in Mississippi, she worked as a feature writer for The Capitol Reporter and The Jackson Advocate. Larson relocated to the Boston/ Cambridge area where she has lived and worked for the past twenty years.

For five years she served as editor of and contributor to Spare Change News, a homeless newspaper based in Cambridge.

Over the years Larson has struggled with mental illness, homelessness and alcohol addiction.
She has been recognized by both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature for her advocacy work on behalf of people with mental illnesses.

As Larson’s life has become more manageable, she has been able to realize her long-term goal in putting together a collection of poetry, Washing the Stones, published by Ibbetson Press, August, 2007. These poems go a long way towards recapturing her promise as a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in the Seventies and as a teaching fellow in the creative writing doctoral program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Her second collection of poetry is titled Mississippi Poems (ISCS PRESS).

Her new work in progress is tentatively entitled Hard Rain Falling.

Poet Robert K. Johnson Tuesday Oct. 20, 2011

Robert K. Johnson was the original poetry editor for the Ibbetson Street Press. A retired Professor of English/Suffolk University-Boston, Johnson has had a number of collections of poetry out, most recently "Choir of Day" (Ibbetson Street Press). Johnson is a recipient of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award, and has been widely published.

Dec. 13, 2011 Poet/ Publisher Gloria Mindock

Gloria Mindock, author of the poetry collections, Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson St. Press, 2007) and Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa, 2010), is editor and publisher of Cervena Barva Press, and in 2007, became the editor of the Istanbul Literary Review, an online journal based in Turkey.

Mindock is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, Doppelganger (S. Press) and Oh Angel (U Soku Stampa), and her poems have been published in numerous journals, including River Styx, Phoebe, Poesia, and Poet Lore, to name a few, as well as appearing in several anthologies. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was awarded a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council distributed by the Somerville Arts Council.

Gloria Mindock

From 1984-1994. Mindock edited the Boston Literary Review/Blur and was co-founder of Theatre S & S Press, Inc. During its existence, Theatre S. received grants from the Polaroid Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Globe Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poetry collection, Doppelganger, served as the text for theatre piece of the same name performed by Theatre S.

Over the years, Mindock has performed, acted, composed music, and sang in the theatre. Her most recent performance piece, Walking In El Salvador. is scheduled to debut this September.

Mindock lives in Somerville, MA, where she has worked as Social Worker, and also does freelance editing of manuscripts and conducts workshops for writers.

Nov. 15, 2011 Poet/Philosopher Jody Azzouni

Jody Azzouni was born in New York City, and returns there as often as possible. He is a Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He has published books in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science with Cambridge University Press, and Routledge (respectively), as well as a book of poetry, "The Lust for Blueprints," with The Poet's Press. He has published or will be publishing poems in places such as Artful Dodge, The Bitter Oleander, and Spillway. Samples of published poems and short stories of hers may be viewed at his website, http://www.azzouni.com/

Nov 8, 2011 5PM is poet, performer James Caroline

My Guest on Poet to Poet Nov 8, 2011 5PM is poet, performer James Caroline

Over the past 4 years, the award winning poet and performer Jme, also known as James Caroline, has made a name for himself nationally through slams and features. In February of 2006 he toured the West Coast with Def Poetry's Caroline Harvey on the highly successful I See Red tour. James is currently the front man for the band Miette with Matt Vears. His work is a rare mix of literary craft and vulnerability, and the intensity of his performances has garnered comparisons to Patti Smith.

James was voted Best Local Author in the 2006 Boston Phoenix poll. He is a multiple winner of Cambridge Poetry Awards for Best Erotic Male Performance Poet and Best Slam Poet Male. He has guest-lectured and performed at Mount Ida College, Hampshire College, Emerson College and Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. In May of 2007 he taught and performed at The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans. He has studied with Anya Achtenberg, Patricia Smith, Regie Gibson, Sascha Feinstein, and Toni Amato. During the spring of 2004 he directed and performed in Musician and the Muse, a performance of poetry and music at The Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center featuring Nicole Terez, Tom Daley, Regie Gibson, and Iyeoka Okoawo.

He has competed with two National Slam teams, and represented the Cantab Lounge in the first Individual World Poetry Slam. In 1997 he was commissioned to write the vocal text and act as artistic sound director for Naked Truths: Voices of Shame, Sexuality, and Eating Disorders in Women, which was performed at HERE multimedia center in Manhattan. He's been published in Quarry, Subliminal, Pinned Down by Pronouns (a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for 2004), The Shadow Sacrament, the Cascadia Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly.

Oct 4, 2011: Paul Steven Stone talks to "To You Who Are Different"

Paul Steven Stone bio:

Paul Steven Stone’s writings have appeared in Cricket Magazine, Point South, Wisdom Magazine, Bagel Bards Anthologies 4,5 & 6 and a boatload of newspapers and magazines. His comic novel, "Or So It Seems", has been called “A rollicking spiritual page-turner!” His story collection, “How to Train A Rock”, was culled from 25 years of genre- and mind-bending newspaper columns. Having written and produced over 100 TV commercials during his long advertising career, Stone most recently wrote and directed a video for teens entitled “To You Who Are Different” (viewable on YouTube) to encourage and support those youth who feel “different” or apart from the mainstream. Currently Director of Advertising for W.B. Mason, Stone lives in Cambridge with his lovely wife, Amy.

“To You Who Are Different” write-up:

"To You Who Are Different" is a powerful video, that features high school students from Randolph, Massachusetts, speaking directly to their peers (the viewers) to help them survive and surmount being different. The film is also a compelling plea for tolerance and respect amongst school-age peers, building on the premise "Everyone of us is different". Very powerful. Teens talking to teens. “To You Who Are Different” has been selected as a core element in Randolph High School’s anti-bullying program.

To view “To You Who Are Different” on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IJA-uxretY

Sept 13 2011 Writer, Publisher, Alan Ball founder of Happeningnow!everywhere magazine

Bio Sketch Alan Ball



Alan Ball is not the celebrated screenwriter, that’s someone else. Not the world cup soccer player either, that’s another one. Alan’s been writing since he was a kid, as he has told one of his favorite students, he started a novel one Saturday when he was about 11, wrote a page and never finished it (yet). He started a notebook which was a take-off on some of the funny stuff around at the time, and in junior high was writing this and that about politics which was pointless since he didn’t know what he was talking about. He started writing free verse at 16 and around 20 also got back to fiction.

His first 2 published poems (1969) were accepted by the East Harlem Writing Center for their Uptown Beat.

Not enrolled there as a student, he and a friend who was and the friend’s writing roommates organized and began creative writing sessions at Bensalem College of Fordham University on Sunday evenings. This soon resulted in their editing and publishing the journal Grub Street. After 4 issues the group dispersed, but Alan and new associates published a 5th through 10th issue during the mid to late 70’s.

Alan married New York City native Patricia Russell in 1974 and completed a degree in creative writing at Empire State College of the State University of New York in 1978 (it involved writing the degree program). Soon thereafter he and Pat relocated to Somerville, Massachusetts. He took a day job and eventually he and Pat started a family. Raising two children brought with its joy the motivation and opportunity to collaborate with kids in writing. Gratitude for the education daughter Emily and son James received in the Somerville public schools led to his working with school kids and receipt of compounding returns from that work. “The reward of hard work is more hard work,” he tells his students.

He has worked for over 25 years as a medical journalist primarily in the role of managing editor of the peer-review academic journals Lasers in Surgery and Medicine and Ophthalmic Surgery, Lasers & Imaging.

Having worked several years with 3rd and 4th graders in writing and poetry as a classroom volunteer, in 2003 Alan organized an afterschool creative writing group at the A.D. Healey School, a K-8 Somerville public school, and with the students in that group and with the support of other students throughout the school, he advised their establishment of a student newspaper that has been a laboratory for writing development utilizing correspondingly developing publishing projects. The magazines that this newspaper has spawned, although small in print circulation, nevertheless are of a national and international reach. Submission is web-based and editorial evaluation is done via email, and all writers under 20 from any part of the world are invited.

To date the discovery of effective and practical publishing methods that address the challenges and employ opportunities afforded by electronic media has resulted from this collaboration. It has successfully derived ways to identify, develop and distribute literature for free while enhancing its intrinsic value, and to maintain a major print component, for the artistic and practical worth of the old medium.

Happeningnow!everywhere (aka Happening Publications) is a loosely organized collective of young writers coordinated and advised by adult mentors to publish multimedia, non-commercial periodicals that serve as teaching tools and quality offerings for young readers.

Guided largely by the interests and direction of the students working with them we now have 3 magazines, all written by young people-- by kids and young adult students-- and advised by peer editors. Happeningnow!everywhere is for writers under 20 and a reading audience age 12 through adult, 12! is for 10agers through young teens and Snowflake! is for age 10 and under. They all are general interest magazines that include informative articles, reviews, personal essays, opinion, fiction, humor and poetry. Art and popular culture are major focuses. All three are published in print and online. The project is informed by our contributing writers and responsive to their needs and points of view. These publications are selective and edited. The editors are recruited from among the contributing writers. The selections are made on the basis of reader interest, originality and quality of craft. The young writers and editors participate in the critical evaluation of innovative approaches and experimentation in seeking solutions to real-life challenges that are faced by writers and publishers.

Recent developments at Happening Publications include print collections of poetry sold for special purpose fundraising (Poetry for Haiti, Poetry for the Species and Poetry for the Healey School & fiction stories). New to the online component of Happeningnow!everywhere is a “self-print” poetry feature where visitors to the website may select and print poems for inclusion in their own loose-leaf collections. Also in view is a magazine for kids containing contributions by kids, young adults and older mentors writing for kids, and direct collaborations between kids and grownup writers.

Submissions for all the magazines are welcome via email or the websites www.happeningnoweverywhere.com and http://12zine.com .

Sept 20, 2011 DEWITT HENRY-- Founding Editor of PLOUGHSHARES and author of " SWEET DREAMS"

July 19, 2011 5PM Poet Margaret Young

Margaret Young, winner of Bright Hill Press's Poetry Book Competition for ALMOND TOWN, grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. After graduating from Yale, she helped found the Open Door Theater Company, performing Shakespeare and children's plays in small Pennsylvania communities. She earned an MA in creative writing at the University of California, Davis, and her first poetry collection, Willow from the Willow, was published by Cleveland State University Press in 2002. She teaches at Endicott College and lives in Beverly, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.

July 12, 2011 5PM Kitty Beers author of " Human Scale."

About Kitty Beers

Kitty is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the National Writers Union, and Grub Street. She has a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.A. from Cornell University. Her articles and stories have appeared in, for example, the Amicus Journal, the Ithaca Journal, Facets magazine, the HILR Review, and Harvard Magazine. Her futuristic screenplay, Home, placed in the 2004 PAGE International Screenwriting Awards contest. Human Scale won honorable mention in the 2010 Hollywood Book Festival contest.

June 14 5PM Poet Linda Lerner

June 14 5PM Poet Linda Lerner





Takes Guts and Years some time, (NYQ) a poetry book by Linda Lerner has been released. Linda has been previously published by Ibbetson Street "Koan from Samsara." She will be having a book signing at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square from 2 to 3PM ( June 14)--hope you can attend!




The New York Quarterly Foundation, Inc.
™
New York, New York

www.nyqbooks.org/author/lindalerner • PO Box 2015 • Old Chelsea Station • New York, NY 10113
For Release: Immediately Contact: Raymond Hammond, Editor; 917.843.8825; rhammond@nyquarterly.org
Publication Information: 5.5 x 8.5 in.; 280 Pages; ISBN: 978-1-935520-31-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011926466 Publication Date: June 1, 2011


Website: http://www.nyqbooks.org/author/lindalerner

NYQ Books™ announces the publication of Takes Guts and Years Sometimes
by Linda Lerner



May 1, 2011 - New York, NY - NYQ Books™ is proud to announce the release of Takes Guts and Years Sometimes: New and Selected Poems by Linda Lerner. Linda Lerner’s latest book is a collection ofpoems dating from the early 80’s to the present. An immigrant daughter’s courageous search forher identity, her refusal to compromise who she is for a paycheck or for love is viewed in the backdrop of major public events. Upheavals in her personal life are paralleled by those in the larger world. There’s the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the subsequent attack in 2001 six blocks from her home. This latter event triggers memories of stories her estranged father told about his escape from Russia. There are the hardships caused by gentrification. The locale is primarily New York City, but it could be any place, where the fault lines of vulnerability in individual lives suddenly give way to tremors outside, and the earth shifts beneath them.



“As one of Whitman’s children, Linda Lerner’s poems are breathless and pulsing, alive with a hunger to taste, devour, smell, witness and embrace. She is insatiable, open, doesn’t want to miss anything.


The poems have an urgency. She is famished for life, is starved for what is hot and spicy, real and she takes risks, refusing to settle. Fascinated by people, she writes movingly not just about her self and her lovers but about her family with its Russian immigrant roots and background and conflict and pain but also about ordinary people in the Bowery, old men and ruined women, the woman in a box, the young with their hormones bursting. She makes the city shimmer with its smells—pastrami and rye and cream soda, smoke, tar, sewer smells, garbage—the beauties and terrors—the World Trade Center attacks, the dangerous streets she refuses to let scare her away. Even the poems of the blues and rawness of life celebrate in
the way the blues celebrate.” —Lyn Lifshin


Linda Lerner is a New York City Poet, born and raised in Brooklyn where she now lives. She is the author of thirteen poetry collections and has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her most recent collections are: Something Is Burning In Brooklyn, (Iniquity Press / Vendetta books, 2009), Living In Dangerous Times (Presa Press, 2007) & City Woman, (March Street Press,2006 ; (The last two
were Small Press Reviews’ Pick of the Month) In 1995, she and Andrew Gettler founded POETS on the line (http://www.echonyc.com/~poets) the first poetry anthology available on the internet.

May 24,2011: Kim Triedman/Patrick Sylvain /Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell,

Kim Triedman Editor of Poets For Haiti (Anthology) and contributors Patrick Sylvain /Marilene Phipps-Ketwell







On February 23, 2010 — six weeks after the city of Port-au-Prince was brought to its knees by one of the most destructive earthquakes on record — 18 remarkable writers joined together on the Harvard University campus and demonstrated just what poetry could achieve. (…)

The poets assembled for the reading represented a remarkable and diverse group. Given the time imperative it became a very democratic and almost incidental kind of assemblage, which was one of the things I most appreciated about the experience. Everyone owned the evening : the poet laureate shared the stage with the high school senior ; the university professors introduced the workaday poets ; the Haitian-born writers were there to speak for themselves. There was no grandstanding. Poets were introduced by name only. People were there to do something as sometimes only a group can — to make themselves heard.

As we were organizing this event, I keep thinking back to a children's book I used to read to my daughters called Miss Rumphius about a little girl named Alice. Alice's grandfather was a retired sea captain living out his old age on the coast of Maine. He tells her about all the wonderful places he has seen on his journeys. When Alice announces that she, too, will travel the world and then find a place by the sea, he replies : « That is all very well, little Alice, but you must also find a way to make the world more beautiful ».

I often think of that line, even after so many years. It's something I take very personally — the imperative, and the privilege. On February 23rd, poets of the greater Boston community came together to read some breathtaking poetry, to a huge audience that had assembled to support a stunning and critically important cause. Like little Alice, who grew old scattering lupine seeds over the hillside of Maine, we had all found a small way, that night, to make the world more beautiful.

Steven Luria Ablon/ Poet--- May 10 2011

Steven Luria Ablon, MD, is an adult and child training and supervising analyst and associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University Medical School. He is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets Award. Dr. Ablon just published his fourth collection of poetry Night Call, in which he explores the experience of doctors from schooling through training to practice. He has three previous collections of poetry: Tornado Weather, Flying Over Tasmania, and Blue Damsels. His poetry has been included in many literary magazines.