Poet, Journalist, dancer Meg Smith will be interviewed Oct 8, 2026

For Meg Smith, writing is a lifelong passion. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many literary journals, magazines, poetry sections in newspapers, anthologies, and many more. Originally from the greater Boston area, she has long made her home in Lowell, Mass., where she served on the board of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! -- a festival honoring native author, Jack Kerouac. Her love of writing and telling a story led her to a career in journalism. The New England Newspaper and Press Association has honored her work with several awards. These include first-place awards for coverage of racial and ethnic issues, and coverage of religion. She also has a passion for Middle Eastern dance, producing many events featuring both dance and spoken word. She also served as a writer and columnist for the Middle Eastern dance magazine, Jareeda, and as associate editor of Belly Dance New England. Of her writing career, she says: "In writing, there is always something new to create, to be created by, and to learn. It is a journey of many paths, always beckoning to discover." She is currently content editor for the Worcester Magazine.

Interview with journalist, poet, astrologer, theatre director, Sally Cragin April 11, 2021

Sally Cragin is an award-winning journalist whose arts writing and theater reviews appeared regularly in the Boston Phoenix, Boston Herald, and most recently, the Boston Globe. She has won two Penney-Missouri Journalism awards for feature writing. She wrote “Moon Signs” for many newspapers nationwide, including the Boston Phoenix chain. She is also the author of The Astrological Elements, and Astrology on the Cusp (Llewellyn Worldwide) which have been translated and sold in a number of countries including India, Russia, Canada, British Virgin Islands, the Czech Republic and Estonia. From 1999-2001, she provided weekly astrological audio forecasts for Audible.com. She serves on the Fitchburg School Committee and is a State Committeewoman for the Worcester/Middlesex Democratic District.

Dec 3 5PM Poet, Translator, Publisher Jim Kates

Jim Kates 

 See it live at 5PM  Dec 3. at  http://somervillemedia.org  



Jim Kates will talk about a new book from his Zephyr Press  Paper-thin Skin by Aigerim Tazhi, that he skillfully translated. We will also touch on his recent poetry, and other projects.




One of the first Kazakhstani women poets to gain international attention, Aigerim Tazhi offers incisive and intimate observations in these seemingly spare poems that “pour out a little from an overflowing heart.”




Paper-thin Skin is her debut collection in translation. Readers will find images of fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death in these succinct poems, along with windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world “in the eye,” as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a “mystic community of communication.”




Aigerim Tazhi  (Айгерим Тажи) was born in the western Kazakhstani city of Aktobe (formerly called Aktyubinsk) in 1981. She is a graduate of the Aktyubinsk (Zhubanov) State University. Her only book of poetry so far, БОГ-О-СЛОВ (“THEO-LOG-IAN” but there is a play on words that could come out "GOD O' WORDS") was published in 2003. She has received numerous literary prizes in Kazakhstan and Russia for poems in the collection, and in 2011 she was a finalist for the Russian Debut Prize in poetry. Her work has been translated into English, French, and Armenian, and published in prominent literary magazines. Tazhi was one of the creators of a project of literary installations, “The Visible Poetry,” in 2009. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan.




J. Kates is the author of several collections of his own poetry, and the translator of more than a dozen books by Russian and French poets, including Tatiana Shcherbina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Mikhail Yeryomin, Aleksey Porvin, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, and Sergey Stratanovsky. He co-translated four books of Latin American poetry, was the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and was the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation, and a Käpylä Translation Prize.

David P. Miller: Actor, Poet, Librarian

David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published in 2014. His poems have recently appeared in Meat for Tea, Ibbetson Street, Constellations, riverbabble, What Rough Beast, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. A Boston resident, he was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group for 25 years.  He has a new book forthcoming from Nixes Mate Press.

Poet,Writer, Professor Kevin Carey author of the short story collection " Beach People" July 7 5PM

Kevin Carey

Kevin Carey teaches in the English Department at Salem State University. He writes poetry, fiction, drama, and the occasional personal essay. His work can be found in several literary journals:  The Apple Valley Review,  The Literary Review, The Comstock Review, and The Paterson Literary Review.




See new poem http://www.connotationpress.com/a-poetry-congeries-with-john-hoppenthaler/may-2015/2552-kevin-carey-poetry
See recent interview with Kevin: https://geosireads.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/interview-with-kevin-carey-author-of-the-beach-people/
His book of poetry, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, is available from CavanKerry Press, NJ. http://www.upne.com/1933880297.html and Amazon.com. A new book of poems, Jesus Was a Homeboy, is forthcoming (Fall 2016 - CK Press).
“Carey’s poems, firmly rooted in the American landscape of the city and its surrounding towns, bring these places and people alive for us in poetry that is specific, clear, and unflinching,” Maria Mazziotti Gillan
 A new chapbbok of fiction - The Beach People - from Red Bird Chapbooks. Now available at http://www.redbirdchapbooks.com/kevin-carey.html
"In Carey’s fiction we meet a band of fast food workers, bartenders, carny operators, a bookie, a nursing home resident and a retired Navy man, all of them intersecting at the boardwalk institutions of this urban beach. These are not the suntan lathered bathing beauties or the muscle men who fawn over them. These are not the families with children making sand castles at low tide. These “Beach People” live across the street, working day after day, trying to survive, in sometimes desperate ways, the insanity of the routine, wanting more but settling for less, and daring to dream too much."


New poems Chicago / Wishing Well http://www.chagrinriverreview.com/kevin-carey.html
Read Home for the Holidays (Best of the Net 2011) http://www.leahbrowning.net/Apple/Spring_2011/Kevin_Carey.html
Read a short story Lucky Day at Ragazine http://ragazine.cc/2013/06/kevin-careyfiction/

Reading of a poem Crazy Stuff at book launch. http://poetmom.blogspot.com/2012/05/kevin-carey-crazy-stuff.html
Watch a new short film collaboration (with his son) www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSPQlWdyCf0
Watch a Revere Beach music video Kevin made in the 90's of the band West https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPaCHdW7BLw
His latest documentary project is a film about New Jersey poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan called All That Lies Between Us.
Watch Movie Trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaFUVTEC9JU 

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.