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.

Aug 2, 2011 Poet Jennifer Jean

Jennifer Jean is the author of the poetry chapbook In the War (Big Table Publishing Co., 2010). Her poetry, essays, literary interviews, and reviews have been published in numerous journals, including North Dakota Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Awakenings Review, Santa Clara Review, Southern California Review, Caketrain, Relief Quarterly, The Wilderness House Review, The MOM Egg Journal, Art Throb and Megaera; as well, she is a feature writer for the arts and lifestyle magazine Art Throb and has received an Agnes Butler Award from the Academy of American Poets. Jennifer directs Thursday’s Theatre of Words & Music artist’s performance series and is the librettist for the Fishwife Music Project; she's an active member of the committee producing the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival and she teaches writing and literature at Salem State University

March 29, 2011 Michelle Hoover author of "The Quickening"

(Photo by Sanjay Subbanna)


Michelle Hoover


Michelle Hoover teaches writing at Boston University and Grub Street.

She has published fiction in Confrontation, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Best New American Voices, among others. She has been a Bread Loaf Writer's Conference scholar, the Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and in 2005 the winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award for Fiction. The Quickening was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction's Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and is a finalist for the 2010 Indies Choice Debut of the Year.

She was born in Ames, Iowa, the granddaughter of four longtime farming families.

March 1, 2011 Poet Ruth Kramer Baden author of "East of the Moon"

Review of EAST OF THE MOON by Ruth Kramer Baden, Ibbetson Street Press, 25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143, 2010.
Book design by Steve Glines (ISCSPress.com)

Review By Barbara Bialick

The poetry collection, East of the Moon, is at once mythic, narrative, story telling and bursting with flavor beads of some great stand-alone poems. As she takes the reader through the lifecycles of a mature woman, age 70, we see the span of a full first collection, which has obviously been writing itself in the back of her mind for a long time. It may be a first book, but not a first-time writer. The work echoes with the awful meanings behind fairy tales, the things that the original tellers didn’t dare to say but to imply. It also seems influenced by William Blake’s voices of innocence and experience.

The cover design and inside black and white ink drawings add a lot to the fairy tale theme. But the royal blue cover and its own painting quoting “Schoen ve de le vune”—you are lovely like the moon.—makes its own stamp on the collection as it literally feels like nubuck leather boots, which mimic the boots of the Cossacks and others roaring through history, using and abusing women and everyone else.

Some examples from the book:

“She was the clever one,/Hansel had always been slow./She knew they could not go back/their stepmother would break them/their father would betray them…”(“Gretel Ever After”).“She told the prince, If I married you/I would become a frostbitter woman/who could not hear my children/sing or cry/…Touch me and I will kill you…He ran… /She made her lonely way over roots and rocks…(to where) a rosewood piano stood/Her hands spanned octaves./She played a Bach prelude.” (“The Sleeping Princess”)Compare this narrative style to poetry later into the life cycle—a grandmother’s poetry:In “Consider the Trees,” she writes sheer lyric poetry: “how I have grown like the cypress/crouched on a cliff/sentinel searching/the inhospitable sea/…all that grows/…must find a way to live.” Or “Rachel’s Birthday Poem”: “You sail into your second year/wobbling and yawing in front/I in your wake/You are the music language makes,/you are the golden heart of the plum.”


Ruth Kramer Baden has been a 1950s married mother, a creator of a local chapter of the National Organization of Women, a journalist, a consultant on children for Wellesley College, and at age 50, she graduated law school! (She practiced elder law). She’s currently working on her retirement dream of becoming a poet. Give her book a try.

Mike Ansara and January O'Neil of the Mass. Poetry Festival

My guest Tuesday Feb. 15, 2011 will be Mike Ansara founder of the Mass. Poetry Festival, and January O'Neil award-winning poet and board member of MPF.





MassPoetry.org is a new program to connect poets and poetry with larger audiences. The project grew out of roundtables with poets in every part of the state to explore that condition of poetry in Massachusetts. Those roundtables were a collaborative effort between MassPoetry.org, the Mass Cultural Council and MassHumanities.

The purpose of MassPoetry.org is to create resources to aid and support the Massachusetts poetry community, to reconnect poetry to more mainstream culture, to create new audiences for poetry and to organize the poetry community throughout the state. MassPoetry.org works to support poets and poetry in a number of ways:

•The Massachusetts Poetry Festival – a unique 2 day gathering of poets and poetry lovers from across the Commonwealth for readings, workshops, panels, concerts, a small press fair and more
•Taking poetry to people: we sponsor poets to work in schools, senior centers, prisons and communities.
•Assisting more readers to read and reconnect with poetry
•Working with teachers to assist them to work with poetry in the classroom
•Creating a central information center for poets and poetry readers and lovers to find reading series, workshops, MFA programs, and other resources
•Building a robust website to support all of these activities
•Linking together all the dispirit strands of the Massachusetts poetry community to promote more collaboration, respect and communication
MassPoetry.org also has a few core principles that inform and guide our work. First, we insist on supporting and giving voice to the full range of poetry across the Commonwealth. This means we work with and support poets of all different styles, schools and approaches, from academic poets at major universities to performance poets in clubs. We work with the full range of ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity, from poets writing exclusively in English to those writing in Creole, Portuguese, and Cambodian. It means we are committed to working with poets from the Berkshires to Cape Cod, from Newburyport to Fall River, in Worcester and the Merrimack Valley, in Chelsea as well as Cambridge. We are committed to expanding the audience for poetry in all those communities and not just in the universities and private prep schools.

Finally we are committed whenever and wherever possible to actually pay our poets for their creative time. Far, far too often poets are asked to donate their time and the results of hours and hours of hard creative work. We value poetry and we value poets. And so whenever possible we pay them for their work.

MassPoetry.org is proud of the start we have made. The Festival has been created and two successful Festivals have been held. We have started pilot programs in schools, in the community and with teachers. We have 59 partner organizations, schools, and institutions across the state. We have a broad, diverse and talented Advisory Board. But as much as we have been able to do, far more remains to be done.

Feb 1, 2011 5PM Kim Triedman, Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell, Patrick Sylvain: Poets For Haiti

Kim Triedman editor for the acclaimed anthology "Poets for Haiti," as well as contributing poets Patrick Sylvain and Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell will appear on "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Jan 25, 2011 W.E. Butts New Hampshire Poet Laureate

W.E.Butts


New Hampshire Poet Laureate 2009-2014
Welcome

W.E. Butts is the author of several poetry collections, including Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café, which was chosen as a finalist for the 2005 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry and selected winner of the 2006 Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize, and the chapbooks What to Say if the Birds Ask (Pudding House Publications, 2007) Sunday Factory (Finishing Line Press, 2006), White Bees (Oyster River Press, 2001), and A Season of Crows (Igneus Press, 2000). He has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, and has taught in poetry workshops at the University of New Hampshire and has been a featured presenter at several community events and conferences. In 2007, he was a visiting writer at Cornell College, Iowa. He is a member of the faculty of the BFA in Writing Program at Goddard College, and is listed in two editions of Who's Who Among America's Teachers. His poems appear frequently in such magazines as Atlanta Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and Poetry East, and have been anthologized in The Anthology of Magazine Verse (Monitor Books), Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press, 1999), Open Door: A Poet Lore Anthology, 1980 – 1996, (Writer’s Center Editions, 1996), Heartbeat of New England: Contemporary Nature Poetry (Tiger Moon Press, 2000), Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day (Iowa Source, 2006), and elsewhere.

Jan 11, 2011 Poet Mignon Ariel King

Mignon Ariel King is an urban womanist writer who was born in Boston’s City Hospital in 1964. An alumna of Simmons College and a former English instructor, she created MAPS-ONE (the Memoir and Poetry Sisterhood of New England) through which she edits the online journal MoJo! and its sister site Extra MoJo!; organizes A Century of Black Voices annual poetry readings to honor Black History Month; and plans future workshops and book contests. She has been reading at open mics since 1998. Her autobio- graphical trilogy (in three genres–memoir, poetry trilogy, novella) is based on a lifetime spent in Greater Boston.


Ms. King’s first published poetry collection is The Woods Have Words (Ibbetson Street Press, 2009). The third volume of her poetry trilogy, Words of Flight, is a series of dramatic monologues of New Englanders, dedicated to her late mother who grew up in New Hampshire. Currently revising and submitting the memoir and novella components of the trilogy, Ms. King is also writing a second novella, set in her childhood neighborhood in Roxbury, Massachuse

Nancy Rubin Stuart Dec 14, 2010 5PM

Nancy Rubin Stuart is a journalist and author who specializes in social trends, women’s history and biography. She began writing professionally as a contributor to New York Times under the byline of Nancy Rubin, first for the Westchester editions of that newspaper, then for several national sections. That work prompted her first book, The New Suburban Woman: Beyond Myth and Motherhood .

Subsequent books included The Mother Mirror: How a Generation of Women Is Changing Motherhood in America, the award-winning Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen , and the best-selling American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post
In 2005 Harcourt published Nancy’s biography of the co-founder of American spiritualism, T’he Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox under the byline, Nancy Rubin Stuart.

Subsequent to a 2005 William Randolph Hearst Award from the American Antiquarian Society Beacon Press published Nancy’s The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation in 2008. Reissued in paperback in 2009, that book won the 2009 Historic Winslow House Book Award and was a 2010 finalist in USA Today Book News "Best Book" Awards.

Nancy serves on the board for the Women Writing Womens' Lives Seminar, City University of New York Graduate Center and is the Artistic Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center.

Nov. 9, 2010: My guest--novelist-- Chava Hudson "The Closing":

My guest will Chava Hudson





After working as a graphic designer, an art teacher, and then designing and producing her own line of outerwear for the boutique market, Chava Hudson became smitten with the Internet. In 1998, she studied web design and since then has created sites for the Universities and non-profits, but mostly designs websites and graphics for small businesses, artists and writers. She brings a unique solution to each project and to each client, discovering each client's needs and communicating their message visually.

As an artist, Chava produces limited edition prints which are currently in private and corporate collections and has taught graphic design digital painting at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. She's completed four novels, many short stories, and publishes Zingology.com an online literary zine.

In 2009 Chava began producing and hosting an award-winning, monthly local cable show for BevCam entitled Out and About, produced by Film North in Beverly, MA. The show features interesting musicians, writers, filmmakers, an occasional foray into cooking, and even a psychic reading by the offical witch of Salem, MA. Later that year, she started The North Shore Jazz Project with Henry Ferrini, one of the guests on the show.


The Closing

by Chava Hudson
Zingology Press
Copyright © 2010 by Chava Hudson
Softcover, 184 pages, no price listed
ISBN 1452865426

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Chava Hudson has succeeded where other writers have failed: you know what murder is about at the beginning, yet the novel works, the people are believable and so you keep on reading.

Hudson’s story is about a real estate agent in a realty firm that does a bit more than sell realty. In fact, the way they drum up business will just kill you. But that’s all I’ll tell you, except that the novel is filled with irony, a touch of humor, but more important, leaves you with serious questions about moral values, mortality and what the future might bring to an ever aging population, a theme done many times, but here with a new twist.

Singles, Anne meets Steve and the romance begins. But Steve’s mother gets in the way, and not as you might imagine. Still, Anne, whose boyfriend has abandoned her, finds a new romance irresistible, even with the knowledge she keeps inside.

The story is fast paced, easy and fun to read and, perhaps, should be read by people with Victorian ideas of life and death and what is noble and what is not.

This is Ms. Hudson’s fourth book (she also writes poetry and edits the online journal zingology). It took her just over a year to write the closing, but the novel idea (yes I mean that both ways)came during a walk around town where she saw a for sale sign on a front yard. The realtor's name was Kevorkian, which got her thinking. Hudson had also just returned from Costa Rica where she spent two weeks at an artist colony and rode up to Monteverde with some friends she had made there. The result, a book worth reading.

Nov. 2, 2010 Writer Joan Leegant " Wherever You Go"

My guest will be novelist: Joan Leegant


Joan Leegant is the author of WHEREVER YOU GO, published July 2010, and AN HOUR IN PARADISE, for which she won the PEN/New England Book Award, the Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Formerly an attorney, she taught at Harvard University for eight years. Since 2007, she has lived half the year in Tel Aviv, where she is the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University and lectures for the U.S. State Department. When not in Israel she lives in Newton, Massachusetts. For more about Joan Leegant and her work, visit: www.joanleegant.com.

Oct 12, 2010: Poet Cam Terwillger

Cam Terwilliger is a poet, fiction writer, and freelance journalist living in Somerville, Mass. A recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fiction Fellowship and a Somerville Arts Council Fellowship, Cam teaches fiction at Emerson College and Grub Street. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Branch, Post Road, The Mid-American Review, The Greensboro Review, The Sycamore Review and others. Cam’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has received an Academy of American Poets Prize. Additionally, he holds an MFA from Emerson College, and has served as a reader for The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and as a judge for The Rhode Island Council on the Arts Fiction Fellowship.

Sept 21, 2010: Endicott College professor and Author of "The Woman Who Named God..." Charlotte Gordon Guest on Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer

Charlotte Gordon is a writer of poetry, non-fiction and fiction. She began her writing life as a poet and has published two books of poetry, When the Grateful Dead Came to St. Louis and Two Girls on a Raft. Her biography of the 17th century poet, Anne Bradstreet, Mistress Bradstreet: The Untold Life of America’s First Poet, (Little, Brown, 2005) won a New England Book Award for non-fiction.

Her latest book, The Woman Who Named God: Abraham’s Dilemma and the Birth of Three Faiths (Little Brown, 2009), retells the famous Biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar.

Charlotte has been featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” with Scott Simon. Her poetry has won many prizes, including a Robert Penn Warren Award. She has been invited to read her work at various colleges, schools, and cultural institutions, including Radcliffe College, University of New Hampshire, Salem State College, University of Massachusetts and The Salem Atheneum. She has also given presentations to historical societies, churches, temples, and book clubs, from Georgia to Wyoming.

Charlotte received an undergraduate degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University and a PhD from Boston University. A post-doctoral fellow at Boston University, she taught Religion and Literature in the Department of Theology and from 1999-2002 was a lecturer in Elie Wiesel’s seminars, The Literature of Memory.

Since 1986, Charlotte has taught creative writing, history, literature, religion, and theater at both the college and secondary school level. From 1992-2002 she was the Director of the Writing Program at The Waring School in Beverly, MA. She currently teaches at Endicott College in Beverly, MA and conducts writing workshops for adults from her home in Gloucester, MA.

Sept. 14, 2010 5PM Judah LeBlang

Judah Leblang is a writer, teacher and storyteller based in Boston, MA. His written and audio pieces combine reflection, keen observation, and humor. Please visit the Writing page to read some of Judah's stories, or listen to audio clips of Judah reading them. There is also information on Judah's CD Finding My Place, and "Snapshots," as well as a schedule of workshops and readings you may wish to attend.

Tues Aug 3, 2010: Poet Populist of Cambridge, Mass--Jean--Dany Joachim

Jean-Dany Joachim was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He is the current Poet Populist of Cambridge Massachusetts. His writing found its voice in the never-ending, complex reality of his country. After moving to U.S.A nearly two decades ago, he left his work in the theatre and began writing in English, while at the same time exploring poetry in other languages. Jean-Dany has translated poetry from and into Spanish, French, Haitian Creole, and English. As the creator and producer of the City Night Reading Series, he brings together poets, writers, performers and lovers of literature for the celebration of the art of word in the Boston and NYC areas. He is the author of “Chen Plenn – Leta”, and his work has appeared in anthologies and numerous literary magazines. He works at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston MA