Dec 8, 2015 5PM Richard Fox

Richard Fox

Richard H. Fox was born and bred in Worcester MA. He attended Webster University, as much artist colony as college, in the early 1970’s. These diverse cultures shaped his world view and love of words. He is a former President of Poetry Oasis, Inc., a non-profit poetry association dedicated to education and promoting local poets, and was Managing Editor of its journal Diner. Richard’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including Above Place, Boston Literary Magazine, OVS, Poetry Quarterly, Midstream Magazine, and Worcester Review. He is the author of two poetry collections: Time Bomb (2013) and wandering in puzzle boxes (2015). A cancer survivor, many of Richard’s poems focus on cancer from the patient’s point of view drawing on hope, humor, and unforeseen gifts. He seconds Stanley Kunitz’ motion that people in Worcester are “provoked to poetry.”

 

Dec 1, 2015 5PM Poet, Writer, Editor Laurette Folk

Laurette Folk received a semifinalist nomination and “Noted Writer” award from the Boston Fiction Festival and has been published in upstreet, The Boston Globe Magazine, Literary Mama, Narrative Northeast, Italian Americana, Talking Writing, among others. Ms. Folk is a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program and teaches at North Shore Community College.

Poet Laurin Macios Nov 3 5PM

Laurin Macios

Laurin Macios directs Mass Poetry’s programs, including Student Day of Poetry, Poetry on the T, Common Threads, U35, and Professional Development, and manages the crew of dedicated volunteers and interns who help make Mass Poetry run smoothly. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire, where she taught on fellowship for three years, and has a background in publishing. Her publications and other personal poetic happenings can be found at www.laurinbeckermacios.com.

Laurin Becker Macios was born in Miami, Florida and raised just short of everywhere (Florida, Germany, North Carolina, Colorado, and Holland). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing Poetry from the University of New Hampshire and is Program Director of Mass Poetry. She previously worked in publishing and taught writing courses at UNH. She lives in Boston with six plants and one wicked awesome husband.

Thomas Lyons--Owner of the New England Mobile Book Fair Tues Oct 13, 2015

Thomas Lyons ( Owner of the New England Mobile Book Fair)

Thomas Lyons, the former insurance executive bought New England Mobile Book Fair (NEMBF), the largest independent bookstore in New England. From the parking lot, the squat cinderblock building nestled in a commercial strip in Newton Highlands, looks unremarkable. But step inside to a bibliophile’s dream. Its 32,000 square feet (more warehouse than shop around the corner) is piled floor to ceiling with books. Classics. Best sellers. Remainders and picture books. NEMBF, which is neither mobile nor a fair, is so named because the first lot of books was bought from a woman who sold books out of her car at school book fairs. With the books came the name, and it stayed. More than half a century later, the store still offers discounts to schools and libraries, and the less than accurate name has long been just one of the store’s endearing peculiarities. Until recently, all of the books (yes, one million plus) were arranged by publisher rather than by genre, as is done in the vast majority of bookstores.

Poet Mary Buchinger Oct 6, 2015

  Poet Mary Buchinger

Mary Buchinger’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including AGNI, Booth, Cortland Review, DIAGRAM, Fifth Wednesday, Ibbetson Street, New Madrid, Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Slice Magazine, The Massachusetts Review; her work also has been published internationally—in Canada, England, France, Germany, Sweden, and The Netherlands. She has read her work locally in Cambridge and Boston, as well as in Amsterdam and at the Library of Congress. Mary was the recipient of both the Daniel Varoujan Award, judged by Marge Piercy, and the Firman Houghton Award from the New England Poetry Club. Her collection, Roomful of Sparrows (2008), was a semi-finalist in the New Women’s Voices Series.

Mary Buchinger (Bodwell) holds a doctorate in Applied Linguistics from Boston University and is Associate Professor of English and Communication Studies at MCPHS University in Boston. More about where she has published poetry can be found in the Poets & Writers Directory:http://www.pw.org/content/mary_buchinger.

Sept 25, 2015 5PM Poet Christopher Reilley

Poet Christopher Reilley

Christopher Reilley is the current poet laureate of Dedham, MA and founder of the Dedham Poet Society and a contributing editor of Acoustic Ink. He is the author of Grief Tattoos, and the upcoming One Night Stanza from Big Table publishing, his work has appeared in a wide variety of places, like Frog Croon, Word Salad, and Chaos Writers, and in such anthologies as “Sanctuary,” “Silent Consciousness,” and “Hot Summer Nights.” He is also the host of the Dedham version of 100 Thousand Poets for Change event in late September.

Sept 15, 2015 Michael Gerhard Martin 5PM

Michael Gerhard Martin

Michael Gerhard Martin holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. He teaches first year rhetoric at Babson, and fiction for the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. His work has appeared in the Ocean State Review, The Museum of Americana Lit Review, Bayou Magazine, The Rust Belt Chic Pittsburgh Anthology, and on Salon.com. He has been a finalist for the Dzanc Disquiet International Literary Festival short play contest, the Nelligan Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award & John Simmons Short Fiction Award, a Glimmer Train New Writers contest, and the Hudson Prize. He won the 2013 James Knudsen Prize for fiction from the University of New Orleans, and he is the author of the short story collection, Easiest If I Had A Gun.​

Aug 4, 2015 Poet, Actor, Playwright George MacDonald 5PM

George MacDonald   (Watch the show live at  http://scatvsomerville.org)

George MacDonald is an accomplished writer, actor and comedian. George has over 23 years sober and spreads his recovery message through the gift of comedy. George has performed with such stars as Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Dane Cook, and Dennis Miller, just to name a few. George is also a playwright, some of his works include: At The Funny Factory, Waiting for Whitey, and Whistling Past The Graveyard. George is a member of The Dramatist Guild of America, Actors Equity Association, Screen Actors Guild and The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

July 14 5PM Poet Afaa Michael Weaver

Afaa Michael Weaver

 

Afaa Michael Weaver

In 1951 in Baltimore, Maryland, Afaa Michael Weaver, formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, was born to working class parents. He attended public schools and graduated as a National Merit finalist at the age of sixteen. After two years at the University of Maryland, he entered the world of factory life alongside his father and uncles and remained a factory worker for fifteen years. These years were a literary apprenticeship during which he wrote and published poetry, short fiction, and freelance journalism. During that time he also started 7th Son Press and Blind Alleys, a literary journal.

His first book of poetry, Water Song, was published in 1985 as part of the Callaloo series. He received a NEA fellowship for poetry six months after signing the contract for the collection and left factory life to attend Brown University’s graduate writing program on a full university fellowship, where he completed an MA with a focus on theater and playwriting. Concurrently, he completed his BA in literature in English at Excelsior College.

Tess Onwueme, the Nigerian playwright, gave him the Ibo name “Afaa," meaning “oracle," while Dr. Perng Ching-hsi, of National Taiwan University has given him the Chinese name “Wei Yafeng," derived from “Wei” for flourishing or blossoming, and “Yafeng," the title of a section of poems from the Book of Songs, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry.

Since Water Song, Weaver has published several more collections of poetry, including City of Eternal Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014); The Government of Nature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Award; The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Multitudes (Sarabande Books, 2000); and The Ten Lights of God (Bucknell University Press, 2000). His full-length play Rosa was produced in 1993 at Venture Theater in Philadelphia. His short fiction appears Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (Little, Brown, 1997), edited by Gloria Naylor, and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American (Penguin Books, 1999), edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan .

Weaver has been a Pew fellow in poetry and taught in National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan as a Fulbright Scholar. He teaches at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts, and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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 

Nina Rubinstein Alonso Poet and publisher of Constellations magazine. June 30th 5PM

Nina  Rubinstein Alonso  (Left)  with poet Kathleen Spivack

Nina Rubinstein Alonso’s poetry appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, Bagel Bards, Ibbetson Street, The New Boston Review, MomEgg, U. Mass. Review, etc. and her stories in Southern Women’s Review, won a Pushcart nominee, and Broadkill Review. David Godine Press published her book This Body. She works with Constellations a Journal of Poetry and Fiction (www.constellations-lit.com) and directs Fresh Pond Ballet in Cambridge (www.freshpondballet.com). 


Watch this show live at  http://www.scatvsomerville.org 

Buell Hollister author of Leeram in Fordlandia June 2 5PM

My guest will be Buell Hollister former president of the St. Botolph Club in Boston and author of Leeram in Fordlandia   watch it live at Poet to Poet

May 12, 2015 Sebastian Lockwood 5PM

SEEE IT LIVE at  http://scatvsomerville.org 

Sebastian Lockwood

Sebastian Lockwood is a Storyteller who specializes in the epics:  The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Odyssey,  CAESAR: the man from Venus,  Beowulf, and… Monkey: A Journey to the West.  These are the great tales of heroic struggle and self-discovery.  Lockwood is now narrating a series of audio books available at Audible.com and Amazon.com.  Working as a traveling bard, teacher and audio book narrator, Lockwood lives with his wife, singer and producer, Nanette Perrotte, by Crotched Mountain, NH.

U/Mass Boston MFA Poets Adam M. Graaf and Alyssa Mazzarella April 28 5PM

 

Adam M. Graaf is completing his MFA at the University of Massachusetts Boston where hecurrently teaches creative writing. He previously taught poetry at Bay State Correctional Center and tutored students enrolled in the Veterans Upward Bound program. Adam served nine years
in the Army Reserve, deploying once to Kuwait and Iraq in 2003/2004. He is an active member of Warrior Writers Boston where he co-facilitates writing workshops. Adam’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in War, Literature & the Arts, Breakwater Review, and CONSEQUENCE. In 2013, he received the New England Poetry Club’s The John Holmes
Award.


Alyssa Mazzarella is an MFA candidate in poetry and an instructor for Introduction to Creative

Writing at UMass Boston. In 2013 and 2014, she received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Mary Doyle Curran Scholarship, and a Brian Rattigan Scholarship. She’s previously taught at Baystate Correctional Center and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and holds a BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in Freshwater and Common Ground Review.

Tuesday, April 21 5PM Wendell Smith

Poet, Journalist, Physician Wendell Smith

Wendell Smith’s poems have appeared in Constellations, Ibbetson Street, The Kansas Quarterly, View Northwestand elsewhere. He has meditated with a raj yoga, Sahaj Marg, for forty years. He thinks Ramon Guthrie and Maximum Security Ward should become to 20th century poetry what Melville and Moby Dick became to 19th century fiction. Smith was among the founder members of the Boston Phoenix.

April 7 Elizabeth Kirschner author of the memior Waking The Bones

( A new memoir from poet Elizabeth Kirschner  Waking The Bones)

Elizabeth Kirschner has published five volumes of poetry, most recently, MY LIFE AS A DOLL,  Autumn House Press, 2008, and SURRENDER TO LIGHT, Cherry Grove Editions, 2009. The former was nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Patterson Book Prize and named Kirschner as the Literary Arts Fellow in the state of Maine, 2010. Her memoir, WALKING THE BONES is forthcoming from The Piscataqua Press.

Kirschner has been writing and teaching multi-genres across four decades. She served as faculty in Fairfield University’s low-residence MFA in Creative Writing Program and has also taught at Boston College and Carnegie-Mellon University.

She has collaborated with with many classical composers and this work is featured on numerous CD’s, including The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons, Schumann/Kirschner.

She currently serves as a writing mentor and manuscript consultant and teaches various workshops in and around her community in Kittery Point, ME.

March 17 5PM Steve Glines Publisher, Editor and novelist--discusses his new novel "Poplar Hill"

Steve Glines

 Steve Glines is the founder of the Wilderness House Literary Review and Press  http://www.whlreview.com. He is also the designer for the Ibbetson Street Press   http://ibbetsonpress.com

view the interview live at 5PM  March 17   http://scatvsomerville.org



He has a new novel in the works  "Poplar Hill"


The synopsis: An eccentric old lady scoffs at death by holding a "living
wake." Everyone in the county attends. When she has a real heart attack,
we follow her as she descends into the hell of pre-war Nazi Germany.



Below is a link to the promotional video


http://tinyurl.com/k8p89np

Poet David Blair Feb 24, 2015 5PM

David Blair’s first book, Ascension Days (Del Sol Press, 2007), was chosen for the Del Sol Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Harvard Review, Ploughshares,Fence, Barnstorm, Slate,storySouth, and elsewhere. He is associate professor at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts. 

Feb 3, 2015 Molly Lynn Watt 5PM

Molly Lynn Watt

`Molly Lynn Watt is an educator, researcher, writer and activist. She was born in Danbury, Connecticut.
In 1963 she worked for Highlander Education and Research Center co-directing The North-South Smokey Mountain Workcamp with her then husband, Robert Lincoln Gustafson, in Townsend, Tennessee. The camp was raided and all participants landed in the Maryville Jail while the camp facilities were mysteriously burned. She moved back to the Boston area and directed work camps in Roxbury, Mass, sponsored by the A.F.S.C. and eleven local organizations including Norfolk Community Center, Freedom House, Saint Mark's Social Center, the B.R.A. and others groups. The goal for the camps was education of participants through working with residents in addressing housing and education issues.
During the 1970s she was active in the Open Education Movement and co-founded one of the nation's first teacher centers located in Brookline, Mass. She supported teachers as writers about their own practice, co-founding with Sarah Hull, Claryce Evans and Margaret Stubbs, The Children's Thinking Network Newsletter, published for five years from 40 Reservoir St. in Cambridge, MA. She was an Associate of the Prospect School in Bennington, Vermont,
In the 1980s, as an activist for experiential, hands-on learning, she traveled extensively giving key note talks at educational conferences and hands-on workshop putting the learner in charge. She advocated using the Logo computer language as a mathematical "sandbox" and the Bankstrret Writer as a blank page inviting free writing to encourage learners creativity consistent with research on the writing process. (This was at a time when there was a parallel development in programmed lessons for educational uses of computers.) In 1986 she traveled with a delegation of six educators to the People's Education Press in Beijing, China to lead the Logo and Educational Computing Workshop for 40 top educators in China. Apple gave them a computer lab as a gift to the Press which was at that time publishing all the curriculum for the 180 million school children on tradition presses. She wrote a monthly column in Teaching and Computers magazine called "Ask Molly", contributed articles toothier magazines, wrote a Logo Curriculum, "Welcome to Logo" published by D.C. Heath and co-authored Teaching wit Logo" with her husband, Daniel Watt, published by Addison Wesley in 1986.
In the 1990s until her retirement at Educational Development, Inc. she led projects funded by the NSF to support teachers of Logo conducting research in their own classrooms, editing a of teacher research with Daniel Watt, New Paradigms in Classroom Research, published by ICC. She took Action Research on-line as part of the Department of Education funded NCIP (national network of special education educators sharing best practices in inclusion.). She founded and directed the Action Research Center at E.D.C. in Newton,MA.
She is a founding member of Cambridge Cohousing where she has lived since 1998 with her husband, Daniel Lynn Watt and 88 others from age 1 to 90, determined to work together to reduce their carbon footprint and make decisions by consensus.
In 2004 she with Daniel Lynn Watt edited, published and performed excerpts of letters his parents exchanged during the Spanish Civil War. His father George Watt was a volunteer in the Lincoln Battalion and his mother Ruth Watt was an organizer and supporter in New York City. George and Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War.Molly Lynn Watt started hosting monthly poetry readings, The Fireside Series, in Cambridge, MA, became the editor for the BagelBards Anthology #1, #2, #3, #4. She served for several years as editor for poetry in the HILR Literary Review, and in 2007 Ibbetson Street Press published her f=volume of poetry, Shadow People.

Michael C. Keith: Media Historian, Memoirist, Fiction writer: Jan 20, 2015 5PM

Michael C. Keith

Michael is the author of over 20 books on electronic media, as well as a memoir and three books of fiction. In 2009, he coedited a found manuscript by legendary writer/director Norman Corwin. What he refers to as his “fringe” group series consists of a monograph that examines the use of broadcast media by Native Americans—Signals in the Air (Praeger, 1995), a book that explores the nature and role of counterculture radio in the sixties—Voices in the Purple Haze (Praeger, 1997), a book that probes the extreme right-wing’s exploitation of the airwaves—Waves of Rancor (M.E. Sharpe, 1999, with Robert Hilliard), a book that examines the role of gays and lesbians in broadcasting—Queer Airwaves (M.E. Sharpe, 2001, with Phylis Johnson), a book about broadcasting and the First Amendment—Dirty Discourse (Blackwell, 2003, with Robert Hilliard), and a volume that evaluates the loss of localism in American radio—The Quieted Voice (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005, with Robert Hilliard).


Keith is also the author of the most widely adopted text on American radio—The Radio Station, 8th edition (Focal Press, 2010), an oral history—Talking Radio (M.E. Sharpe, 2000), a study of nocturnal broadcasting –Sounds in the Dark (Iowa State University Press, 2001), and The Broadcast Century, 4th edition (Focal Press, 2005, with Robert Hilliard. His most recent books include Radio Cultures (Peter Lang, 2010) and Sounds of Change (University North Carolina Press, 2010, with Christopher Sterling). He is also the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, The Next Better Place (Algonquin Books, 2003), as well as numerous journal articles and two books of short stories––And Through the Trembling Air and Hoag's Object. He has been invited to lecture internationally.
Prior to joining Boston College, Keith served as Chair of Education at the Museum of Broadcast Communications. He is co-founder of the Broadcast Education Association’s Radio Division, was director of the communication program at Dean College, and served as an invited professor at George Washington University and Marquette University. He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the International Radio Television Society’s Stanton Fellow Award, the Broadcast Education Association's Distinguished Scholar Award, and the University of Rhode Island’s Achievement Award in the Humanities.

He is the author of several short story collections including  The Collector of Tears, and If Things Were Made to Last Forever ( Big Table Publishing).

Jan 6. Guest: Novelist Margot Livesey

   

Margot Livesey

 
Margot Livesey grew up in a boys' private school in the Scottish Highlands where her father taught, and her mother, Eva, was the school nurse. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. Her first book, a collection of stories called Learning By Heart, was published by Penguin Canada in 1986. Since then Margot has published six novels: Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, Banishing Verona and The House on Fortune Street. Her seventh novel, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, will be published by HarperCollins in January 2012.
Margot has taught at Boston University, Bowdoin College, Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon, Cleveland State, Emerson College, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Tufts University, the University of California at Irvine, the Warren Wilson College MFA program for writers, and Williams College. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the N.E.A., the Massachusetts Artists' Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts. Margot is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.
Alice Sebold says, "Every novel of Margot Livesey's is, for her readers, a joyous discovery. Her work radiates with compassion and intelligence and always, deliciously, mystery."

Dec 9, 2014 Interview with Christopher Busa, founder of Provincetown Arts magazine.

Christopher Busa

Christopher Busa, founder and editor of Provincetown Arts magazine, was born in New York City in 1946, the son of a painter who participated in the formative years of  Abstract Expressionism. Spending part of every year in Provincetown  since infancy, he slowly absorbed its mythology as a place where artists  and writers gather to work and live. After graduation from the University of Minnesota, he studied for a year in Paris at the Sorbonne, and then pursued a Ph.D. for ten years while teaching English at Rutgers University. His interviews and profiles of artists and writers have appeared in the Paris Review, Arts, Partisan Review, Garden Design, and other magazines. Two published pieces were reprinted in Interviews and Encounters with Stanley Kunitz, edited by Stanley Moss (Sheep Meadow Press). Another essay, “Being a Great Man Is a Thesis Invented by Others,” appeared in Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock (Thunder’s Mouth Press). He has curated exhibitions and written catalog introductions for many artists. He co-edited and introduced the Erotic Works of D.H. Lawrence (Crown, 1989), the subject of his dissertation. He is the author of The Provincetown Artists Cookbook, with Written Sketches of the Artists Creating a Contemporary Portrait of the Town as an Art Colony (Abingdon, 1988).Over the past 20 years he has taped several hundred interviews and created files on over 1000 artists and writers in preparation for a comprehensive title about the century-long history of the art colony.  His WOMR FM 92.1 radio program, “ArtTalk,” airs three times a month over the past five years, introducing new and established artists, performers, and writers discussing their current project and what moves them to do it.He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), based in Paris, and he is one of 16 members of the American New England Chapter, which selects two dozen “Best of” exhibitions annually in museums, commercial galleries, and university art galleries in painting, sculpture, and architecture. He is on the board of the Norman Mailer Society and on the editorial board of the Mailer Review,published by the Society and by the University of South Florida. He teaches one semester a year in the low-residency Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania.

Dec 2, 2104 Poet Pui Ying Wong

PUI YING WONG

   



Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of a full length book of poetry Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008) and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review, New York Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review,  Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Desde Hong Kong: poets in conversation with Octavio Paz, Chameleon Press (Hong Kong), The Brooklyner, Brooklyn Voice, Angle Poetry (U.K.), The Asian Pacific American Journal, Taos Journal of Poetry & Art, 2Bridges Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Ucity Review, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Constellations, Crannog (Ireland), Gargoyle, 5 AM, decomP, A Narrow Fellow, The New Poet, Blood Lotus Journal, Slippery Elm, Blue Fifth Review, Chiron Review, Foundling Review,  Literary Bohemian, The Boiler Journal, , DMQ Review, , Gravel, Mojave River Review, Offcourse, Pirene’s Fountain, Red River Review, Cavalier Literary Couture, Reprint Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly among others.  Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Web and she was a finalist for the 2011 Sundress Best of the Net editions. She is also a book reviewer for Cervena Barba Press.  After living many years in Brooklyn, she moved to Cambridge, MA with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.

Poet Elizabeth McKim 5PM Nov 4, 2014

Poet Elizabeth McKim

See the show live at:  Poet to Poet with host Doug Holder



Elizabeth Gordon McKim has published five books of poetry, the latest being The Red Thread (Leapfrog Press). She is a teacher, performance poet, spoken word artist, and has been an adjunct professor for forty years in the department of Creative Arts in Learning at Lesley University. McKim is the poet laureate of the European Graduate School, and the Jazz Poet of Lynn where she lives, in a renovated shoe factory. She is included with four others in the new anthology, Wild Women of Lynn, published by Blaine Hebbel and The Ring of Bone Press.

Poet/Educator David DiSarro Oct 14, 2014 5PM

David R. DiSarro is currently an Assistant Professor of English and the Director of the Writing Center at Endicott College in Beverly, MA.  He received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Composition from Ball State University, his M.A. in Creative Writing from Southern Connecticut State University, where he was also a graduate research fellow, and his B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Maine at Farmington. David's work has previously appeared in The Hawaii Pacific Review, Shot Glass Poetry Journal, Haiku Journal, The Ibbetson Street Magazine, The Orange Room Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, Third Wednesday, among others.

Oct 7, 2014 Poet/Vocalist/Musician Jennifer Matthews 5PM

SINGER/SONGWRITER JENNIFER MATTHEWS: An artist of the road, heart and life.

Jennifer Matthews  (Photo by Syed Zaman)

Poet/Vocalist/Musician   Jennifer Matthews is releasing a 7^th CD  "Tales of a Salty Sweetheart."  She has engineered this album herself and it was mixed by Phil Greene ( 25- time Grammy Award-winning engineer) who according to Matthews told her, “Tales of a Salty Sweetheart is one of my favorite records I have mixed in the last 10 years.” Matthews had a number of musician preform on this album including Russell Chudnofsky who played the Dobro slide guitar. The CD will be released by the label Thundamoon Records founded by her manager Rose Gardina, who also founded the Boston Girl Guide website and magazine.

Matthews, who is studying  at Salem State University for her degree in English, said when she writes lyrics she literally locks herself in a room. She smiled "I can’t be disturbed.” And like the poem finding the poet ,the song finds Matthews. Matthews says she is in touch with her “inner voice.” Her lyrics can be ethereal and transcendent and she counts Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan as spiritual masters who have influenced both her lyrics and music.

 

Matthews has been collaborating on poem song projects with poets Doug Holder and Dennis Daly, and will be taking on new projects as time allows.

For more information about upcoming events go to:Jennifer Matthews

Poet Krikor Der Hohannesian Sept 16, 2014 5PM

Krikor Der Hohannesian lives in Medford, MA. His poems have appeared in many literary journals including The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, Peregrine and Connecticut Review. His first chapbook, “Ghosts and Whispers”, was published by Finishing Line Press (2010) and was nominated for the Pen New England and Mass Book Awards. A second chapbook, “Refuge in the Shadows”, has just been released (Cervena Barva Press). He can be contacted at krikorndh@verizon.net for anyone wishing to order copies ($10 including shipping and postage).


"In Krikor Der Hohannesian's poetry, we hear things we might not be able to hear otherwise. "A man is down" signals the wind and rain coming in from the east, and the poet listens. In another poem a wife is keening, a child is crying, and the poet listens, listens with all his imagination and his heart. We hear colonial whispers emanating from the Granary Burial Ground. We hear the particular beauty of the names of the winds in many languages, and in another poem we hear the equally specific sadness of parents grieving a lost child. We hear final words, and words that should have been said, and we hear in several of these poems the long, agonized memory traces of the Armenian genocide. In all there is a deeply empathic imagination at work, and these poems give the poet and the reader alike a place of refuge, a place in the shadows in which to hold onto what is so profoundly dear and filled with meaning." -Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House

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. 

July 22, 2014 5PM Poet Kathleen Aguero

Poet Kathleen Aguero

In addition to After That (Tiger Bark Press), Kathleen Aguero’s poetry collections includeInvestigations: The Mystery of the Girl Sleuth(Cervena Barva Press), Daughter Of(Cedar Hill Books), The Real Weather (Hanging Loose), and Thirsty Day (Alice James Books). She has also co-edited three volumes of multi-cultural literature for the University of Georgia Press (A Gift of Tongues, An Ear to the Ground, and Daily Fare) and is consulting poetry editor of Solstice Literary Magazine. She is a winner of the 2012 Firman Houghton Award from the New England Poetry Club and a recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Elgin-Cox Foundation. She teaches the low-residency M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College and in Changing Lives through Literature, an alternative sentencing program.

July8 5PM Zachary Bos

 
Zachary Bos studied in the graduate poetry program at Boston University. He's been on the editorial staff of publications including News from the Republic of Letters, Fulcrum, Clarion, and The Battersea Review, and is current editor of Poetry Northeast. From the Pen & Anvil Press sharespace on Newbury Street, he publishes books, periodicals, literary posters, and chapbooks, including a new series of poems that have been hand-written, burned, and then "published" as ashes in corked glass bottle reliquaries. He lives in Lunenburg with his fiancee and family.

July 1 , 2014 5PM Poetry Editor of Ibbetson Street lit mag Harris Gardner

( Doug Holder left/ Harris Gardner right)

Harris Gardner --poetry editor of Ibbetson Street will join me to discuss the new release of Ibbetson Street 35. We will read selected poems from the issue...

June 17, 2014 Janice Silverman Rebibo 5PM

Janice Silverman Rebibo

Janice Silverman Rebibo (born 1950) is an Israeli poet who began writing in Hebrew in the mid-1980s.
Rebibo’s poems have been admired for having, “a new strength and the kind of courage that comprises a strategic breakthrough, a stance of both audacity and humor that adds something new to the war of independence of Israel’s consciousness – a revolution of language, spirit and mind.” (critic Menahem Ben).^[1] Rebibo is an Israeli poet born in Boston, who began writing in Hebrew while studying Hebrew language and literature at Hebrew College. Dozens of her poems have appeared in Israel’s major newspapers and journals. Recently, an anthology of Israeli writers of English included several of Rebibo's poems and the journal, Iton 77, featured her Hebrew poem, Etzb’a Elohim (God’s finger).^[2] The first of her four poetry collections, Zara (a stranger-woman, referring to the figure in Proverbs), was published in 1997.^[3] She later served as chief translator for Natan Yonatan, completing Within the Song to Live, his bilingual volume of selected work, following that popular poet’s death in 2004.^[4] Zara Betzion: shirim 1984-2006 (a stranger-woman in Zion), a blend of two literary traditions, is Rebibo’s latest collection, which received a President of Israel Award and other prizes.^[5] Her poems have been set to music by multi-hit composer, Gidi Koren. In addition to the English libretto for composer Matti Kovler's The Escape of Jonah, Rebibo also collaborated with Kovler to write the libretto for Here Comes Messiah!, performed at Carnegie Hall in 2009 and at Boston’s Jordan Hall in 2010.^[6]

Janice Silverman Rebibo's first collection of poetry in English, My Beautiful Ballooning Heart, was published in July, 2013.^[7] How Many Edens, Rebibo's most recent poetry chapbook, was published in April, 2014 ^[8] Using allusions, humor and eroticism, much of Rebibo's poetry shows how relationships are shaped by language, culture, religion, and politics. Her first Hebrew poems appeared in 1984 in the literary supplement of the Hebrew language newspaper Davar on the recommendation of Israeli poet Haim Gouri.^[9] Since then, Rebibo’s poems and short stories have appeared frequently in Israel's literary pages and journals ^[10] and four books of her Hebrew poetry have been published and characterized in the press as a bold blend of two rich poetic traditions.^[11] Zara in Zion: Collected Poems 1984-2006 by Janice Rebibo, published in 2007,^[12] includes Hebrew poetry from her three earlier books and new work previously published in Israel's literary journals, as well as a chapter entitled Zion by Itself containing poems Rebibo has written in English.^[13] Rebibo has translated Hebrew poetry into English, notably for poet Natan Yonatan.^[14] Her poems have been set to music and recorded. Hazman Ozel (time is running out), music by Gidi Koren, was released in 2009 by NMC on a live performance DVD by The Brothers and The Sisters.^[15] She has also collaborated with composers on texts and librettos. Here Comes Messiah!,^[16] a monodrama for soprano and chamber orchestra by Matti Kovler, libretto by Janice Silverman Rebibo and Matti Kovler, was premiered at Carnegie Hall with soprano, Tehila Nini Goldstein, on May 9, 2009 at the Osvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Young Artists Concert.^[17] Rebibo has edited and translated prose for novelist, Yizhar Smilansky (S. Yizhar), Toronto filmmaker Avi Lev,^[18] Prof. Moshe Bar-Asher at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and for other leading Israelis in literary criticism, linguistics, business, and technology.

In addition to her literary work, Janice Rebibo directed an innovative school-pairing program to promote tolerance, friendship, and cooperation in Israeli society and serves as SPO at a non-profit for the advancement of Hebrew language teaching and learning in North America.