Feb 3, 2009 Molly Lynn Watt

MOLLY LYNN WATT worked for 45 years with schools for better education and with communities organizing for peace, justice, and civil rights. She retired a few years ago to devote full time to writing. She curates the Fireside Reading and is the poetry editor of HILR Review and three anthologies of Bagels with the Bards. With her husband, she co-created and performs George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, live and on CD. Ibbetson Street Press published her book of poems, Shadow People, in 2007. Her work appears The Boston Globe, Chicken Soup, Domestic Affairs, Eclipse, Fulcrum, G.W. Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Occasional Moose, Peaceworks, The 2008 Poets' Guide To New Hampshire, Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, South Carolina Review, Spare Change, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Westview, Best of Wilderness House Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Willard & Maple, and others.

Jan 13, 2009 5PM Biker Poet, editor, activist, Jose Gouveia

(Jose Gouveia Front)



Biker poets
New book collects best of “Biker Poetry”


Jan 13, 2009 5PM Biker Poet, editor, activist, Jose Gouveia


Rubber Side Down. Edited by Joe Gouveia, Peddlar Bridges, and Susan Buck. (Archer Books PO BOX 1254 Santa Monica, CA. 93456) $16.

Did you know there is a Biker Poet movement? Bikers are not only Hell's Angels with leather and nefarious intent, but poets, on the road, burning rubber, and spouting odes to the endless highway. Joe Gouveia, poet, motorcycle enthusiast, and new head of the “Highway Poets Motor Cycle Club” had the good sense to edit an anthology of Biker bards. The poetry club, founded by Colorado T. Sky, boasts many fine poets in their ranks. Allen Ginsberg commented on the concept of “Biker Poets”(according to a history included in the anthology):

“The Highway Poets could be, for their generation, what the Beat Poets were for ours.” And for this lively subculture of poets this could indeed be the case.

The title “Rubber Side Down,” according to an essay in the book by Martin Jack Rosenblum means to ride safely, and “we shall meet again at the next café for coffee or swap meet for spare parts-if we have kept it down safely.” To the biker, cars are cages, vehicles of conformity.

Rosenblum defines Biker poetry, or at least the Biker poetry presented in this book:
“The poetry in this book is written by folks who are outside the cultural safety zone. Some ignore technique, some deplore it, some explore it beyond where workshop academics would confine it and some take a breather from the understood confines of a literary canon sensibility to gather a better voice because of a crazy, two-wheeled power drift into experiential reverie.”

I was pleased to see a number of poets that I know and have published appear on these pages including: Linda Lerner, K. Peddlar Bridges, and Marc Goldfinger.

Goldfinger has an intriguing prose poem “The State Trooper & The Biker Get Tested.” It involves his offbeat encounter with an offbeat State Trooper while riding his late wife's bike.

Naturally, many of the poets in this collection write of the vehicle of transcendence, the motorcycle. The beloved bike provides them with freedom from the grind of everyday. In her poem “It's Okay,” Susie Howard portrays the road as a trip that flies in the face of convention:

“But the road is free of that
It is the steady air against the skin
whipping hair and clothes
and flawed thinking from my mind
with the steady hum of opposing carburetors
passing by dinosaur Buicks
traveling to destinations of work,
lifestyle, maintenance, drone hood
while I follow no map but that of whim
and its steady song of
It's okay.
It's okay.
It's okay.”

And Diane Wakoski in the “The Desert Motorcyclist” explains why it is better to ride a motorcycle than a man:

“Now I run away
to my dry desert,
the place where there is enough space
for my imagination
and nothing to drown it.

Desert motorcyclist:
that is me.
And it is the man,
never the machine
who betrays me.”

If you never have been exposed to this genre, then get a strong grip, plant your rear on a leather hide, hear those cylinders roar, and take a ride.

Jan 6, 2009: Poet, Vocalist, Journalist: Lo Galluccio

My Guest on Jan 6, 2009 at 5PM Lo Galluccio:



With Lo Galluccio it is a "coup de foudre". You're reading something like:

"...Accept kisses of water in light" and there's no help because she's hit

the mark and you wish what she writes again would reveal everything

else. Yet you don't know how much that fight will can be dangerous to you,

really like a boxer until fatal k.o.: Lo, the girl from Boston, hides other

concentric fires which your unbridled imagination already foresaw by certain

words caught in a poem entitled Bloom the River. Words like islands of

introspection, densities, intimates: "Oh sky. Shadows of these days cut

looping my hair against his wall. My profile's smoke." (from Blasphemy).

Pulsating, vibrant, throbbing verses included in a collection of poems called

Hot Rain, published by Singing Bone/Ibbetson Street Press in 2004 that first

emerged from the soul of a woman with multiple qualities of actress, poet,

singer and musician.



Roy Nathanson, already saxophone player in the legendary Lounge Lizards

and then leader of the Jazz Passengers, indeed targeted her through those

poems beginning a fruitful collaboration (she appeared in 1994 on their

In Love) until exordium in 1997 - under her own name - on renowned

Knitting Factory label, she produced the astonishing Being Visited followed

(2003) by a self-release production entitled Spell on You, further nine tracks

of uncommon and burning intensity.



Poetry can be "possession" and Lo seems "possessed by Poetry: strenght,

urgency, fury of written word. She breaks her mirror and you try to gather

some fragment of yourself into them, discovering, little by little, the soul who

those verses of flesh and blood has embodied.

Tortuoses, dramatics and also obscure verses, disseminated by pitfalls and

precipices. Words chosen with care by her, sometimes hard and pointed inside

a sensual and ethereal texture at the same time, modern and antique, part of

the world and yet distant from it, unforeseen, surprising, sounding like an

unusual gesture during a meeting with someone.



Lo Galluccio' s poetry is authentic passion, sincere, true,on the path traced by

Robert Lowell and John Berryman, voices of the "confessional poetry" and as

two symbols of womanly American poetry named Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

(or the less know - at least in Italy - Diane Di Prima, Diane Wakoski and Denise

Levertov) but also elegant and intriguing like an Antonia S. Byatt's page.



While you're writing about this, her voice has already contaminated you like a

virus, with no help of healing, her mesmerizing voice-presence blending sounds

in your mind evoking different atmospheres between the subliminal jazz of

Ctramsplit, Back Porch or Let Em Think My Wings Iz Broke with obliquity, sinuose

recitatives, transparencies, harshness, melancholy, that you have loved in Rickie

Lee Jones or Patti Smith and maybe in that Lydia Lunch noir's touch but Lo rebuild

"ex novo", shaped to herself , to her own soul, soaked by genuine pathos, splendidly

unveiled in the shadings of These Diamonds Are My Very.

Yes, jazz above all, but also blues and also a charming cover of Sinatra's Fly Me to

the Moon or an unexpected Que Sera Sera, from a groove to the other, giving us

whole herself.



But a simple sigh could be sufficient to her, ever singing - one more time - :

Will you love me like Leda's Swan ? Can you love me like Leda's Swan ?


* Lo has a new memoir out "Sarasota Vll" ( Cervena Barva Press. )

Dec 23, 2008 5PM Marguerite Bouvard

Dec 23, 2008 5PM: Poet, writer Marguerite Bouvard


Current Project

Marguerite is currently writing a book, Mothers in All But Name. It will focus on a much neglected topic, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends and strangers who have acted as mothers.

Biography

Marguerite Bouvard was for many years a professor of Political Science at Regis College and a director of poetry workshops. She is multidisciplinary and has published 15 books, numerous articles in the fields of political science, psychology, literature and poetry. Both her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized. She has received fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and from the Puffin Foundation. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Maryland and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony the Yaddo Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Leighton Artists’ colony at the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Marguerite’s activities as a Resident Scholar include organizing the first Tillie K. Lubin Symposium, as well as sponsoring lecture series on women and human rights and on environmental racism. Marguerite was also a founding editor of the All Sides of Ourselves publication series. She continues to organize panels for Women’s History Month and has had two collaborative exhibits at the Dreitzer Gallery and one at the gallery in the Women’ Studies Research Center.

Dec. 9, 2008: Barbara Helfgott Hyett

BARBARA HELFGOTT-HYETT


Poet, professor and public lecturer, Barbara Helfgott-Hyett has published four collections of poetry: In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (University of Pittsburgh Press: 1986), based on her interviews with U.S. GI's, was selected Booklist's "Editor's Choice." Her second collection, Natural Law (Northland Press, 1989) includes poems about the history of Atlantic City, and was the first in the Salt River poetry series. The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus (University of Illinois Press: 1992), an epic poem on the 1492 voyage of the Columbian expedition, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The Tracks We Leave: Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, (University of Illinois Press:1996). Her new collection, Rift, is just out from University of Arkansas Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines including The New Republic, The Nation, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Women's Review of Books, and in twenty-five anthologies. Recipient of two Massachusetts Artists Fellowships in Poetry, the New England Poetry Club's Gertrude Warren Prize, the Herman Melville Commemorative Poetry Prize, Fellowships at Yaddo, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and other grants and awards, she has taught English at Harvard, MIT, and Boston University where she won the Sproat Award For Excellence in Teaching. She is a co-founder of The Writer's Room of Boston, Inc, and Directs POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets, in Brookline, MA.

NOV 18, 2008: Boston Poet Laureate--Sam Cornish

Nov. 18 5PM my guest will be Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish:





Boston's poet laureate of the people
For Sam Cornish, sharing is the key
By Tania deLuzuriaga, Globe Staff | January 20, 2008

Back in the 1960s, poet Sam Cornish used to wander the streets of Boston with long hair and bare feet. Though he's a bit more distinguished looking today, in thick glasses and often sporting a jacket and tie, his free-spirited nature endures.

"I'm not a snob," said Cornish, named last week as the city's first poet laureate. "I like Rachel Ray and westerns, I collect comic books. I don't mind getting drunk on occasion, not intentionally, but because I like whiskey."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced Tuesday that Cornish, a former Emerson College literature professor, would be the first to fill a post the city has never had before.

"He has not just a great literary background, but a real commitment to promoting poetry across the city," said Alice Hennessey, who oversees special projects for the city, including the poet laureate selection committee.

City officials see Cornish as a poet of the people, someone who will reach across racial and socioeconomic lines to promote literacy through poetry.

After moving into his office at the Boston Public Library, Cornish's first duties will include organizing a poetry workshop for teens and putting together an event for Black History Month in February.

"I want to do a tour, but instead of bookshops and universities I want to go to neighborhoods, school rooms, living rooms," Cornish, who lives in Brighton with his wife, said in an interview yesterday. "Highly visible artists are too rare. 'Rare' is good for wine, but it sucks for an artist. . . . My work comes out of Boston's daily experience, I want to be able to share that with my own."

Cornish, 72, said he started writing as an angry teenager, living in the poor black neighborhoods of Baltimore. Inspired by the likes of E.E. Cummings and T.S. Eliot, he abandoned the notion of poetry within the confines of rhyme and meter, instead writing streetwise observances of his world in free verse, a practice that continues today.

He moved to Boston in the 1960s, after serving in the Army Medical Corps. He traveled back and forth between Boston and Baltimore for the next decade, settling here in the mid-1970s.

"Boston was a horror show when I first came here," he remembered, referring to racial tensions in the city. "But it was better than Baltimore."

Much of Cornish's poetry embodies the African-American experience of the past 70 years, dealing with themes such as slavery, kinship, and civil rights, in language as tough as life on the streets.

"My mother's back is bleeding/ like the avenues and streets/ of American cities is dark/ & red like barbecue," reads a poem called "The Beating," published in 1996.

While Cornish's work often deals with the black male experience, he blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction.

"Ninety-five percent of it is not me at all," he said. "I use my life as a source, I represent the story through people who resemble - but who are not - me."

When City Councilor John Tobin introduced a resolution last year to create the two-year post of poet laureate, Cornish said he turned his nose up at the prospect.

"These things usually go to people who are well connected," he said. "I am not connected. I don't give safe interviews, and I work very hard not to give any impression of intelligence."

Cornish eventually gave in to the urging of his friends and applied for the position, which pays a corporate-sponsored $2,000-a-year stipend. Hennessey said the selection committee was taken with his commitment to education and the broad spectrum of ideas covered in his poetry, choosing him over 15 other applicants.

In announcing Cornish's appointment, Menino called him "an accomplished poet who will honor our city's rich literary heritage."

In addition to working with the city's youth, Cornish hopes to hold readings and workshops for senior citizens and put a spotlight on the city's underground arts scene.

"There's a lot going on that no one knows about," he said. "In Boston you have a wonderful cultural mix. Sometimes it's a little hectic, but it's all there."

Poet Jason Tandon Nov. 11, 2008

My guest Nov 11, 2008 5PM will be poet Jason Tandon author of the poetry collection:

Wee Hour Martyrdom



Jason Tandon was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975. He is the author of Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press (due out in 2009). He is also the author of two chapbooks, Rumble Strip (also from sunnyoutside) and Flight, both of which were nominated for the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award. His poems were twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and have appeared in many journals, including New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, and Fugue. Tandon holds a BA and MA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire.

Nov 4, 2008 Lawrence Kessenich : Former Houghton Mifflin Editor and Poet

My guest Nov 4, 2008 at 5PM is Lawrence Kessenich:


"I was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1950 -- the year it was chosen "The All-American City" by Life Magazine -- and lived in a small town for a few years, but was in Milwaukee by seven years old, so I consider it my home town. Undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, took six years to get through, from 1968-1974 -- quite an era to be in college! Meandered through my twenties, and finally went to grad school in creative writing (poetry) at UMass Amherst in 1977, at 27, where I lived half-a-block from Emily Dickinson's house and encountered poets James Tate, Donald Junkins, and Joe Langland (who tried to seduce me on the banks of Quabbin Reservoir, after we drank retsina, which he hid in a tree hollow, read poetry, and went for an illegal swim in the reservoir). When I didn't get a teaching assistantship for my second semester, I had to drop out of UMass, and I applied for the Radcliffe Publishing Course, was admitted, and attended in the summer of 1978.

My first publishing job was as editorial assistant to Robie Macauley, a well-known name in the literary world, at Houghton Mifflin (pronounced ho'-tun mif'-lin, by the way -- many people don't know how to pronounce it correctly). HM's trade division was still in a brownstone on Park Street, at the time, with a manual elevator. Robie, my boss, had been a rising star writer in the 50s, went the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he dated Flannery O'Connor, and went on to edit The Kenyon Review and become the first serious fiction editor of Playboy (good stories about his time there, by the way). He came to HM as a senior editor. I had to teach myself to type faster as his assistant, because I had to type all his letters, from which I learned a lot about how to speak to writers about their work. I also shared an office with another editorial assistant right next to the office of the editor-in-chief, Austin Olney, and was in a position to see things such as John Kenneth Galbraith -- an !
enormously tall man -- duck his way under our doorways to visit Austin.

Within a year of arriving at HM, I realized that I was going to have to show that I could acquire books in order to have any chance of being promoted, so I started pursuing authors. My first two successes were W. P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe" (probably my best publishing story) and Rick Boyer's "Billingsgate Shoal," a mystery (which won the Edgar for Best Mystery Novel of the Year.) Both books were accepted at one editorial meeting -- which I could not attend, as an editorial assistant -- and "Shoeless Joe" won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, so those two books made people aware of me within HM, and I was soon promoted to assistant editor, and I could start traveling to NYC to visit agents. I was ultimately promoted to editor by Nan Talese, well-known literary editor and wife of Gay Talese. I had lunch at her home in NYC a couple times, and met Gay and saw his study, with its endless rows of filing cabinets containing research documents for his many non-fiction books.!


Over my 9.5 years at HM, I acquired another HM Literary Fellowship-winning novel, "Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street" by David Payne as well as other fiction and nonfiction books. I worked with Diane Middlebrook and Diana Hume George, the editors of "Selected Poems of Anne Sexton" and, for a few years of the nine she worked on it, with Diane on "Anne Sexton: A Biography" (there was a very controversial aspect of that book, which occurred during my watch, so you should ask me about that). I met Jimmy Carter, whose biography Nan Talese edited (one day she called me into the conference room as I passed by to show me several Carter family photo albums that Jimmy had lent her to find photos for the book). Our "slush pile" (unsolicited mss. reader), Dell Hammond, passed on Terry McMillan's first novel, "Mama," to me, and I ended up being her first editor. (There are some very good stories about her, so be sure to ask about that experience.) "Shoeless Joe" was sold to the movies!
and became the basis for "Field of Dreams." On the eve of my departure from HM, my wife and I were invited to Fenway Park to be extras in the movie, and I was very warmly received by the director and actors, who knew the whole story of my work with Kinsella. The director placed us so that we appeared onscreen, in the background, during in the movie.

I left HM because I was frustrated with the limitations of book acquisition -- how much time had to be spent "selling" books one wanted to acquire to fellow editors and sales, sub rights and publicity departments -- and I was also too much on the writers' side to be a very good contract negotiator. I left HM in June, 1988 -- the very month of the "Shoeless Joe" filming at Fenway Park.

Since then, I have made my living, first, as a technical editor, then as a technical writer, and, finally, as a marketing writer for various marketing agencies and marketing departments of companies. During that time, I have written children's books and novels for adults (had agents for some of these, but none sold), short stories, poetry, and, most recently short plays -- I just submitted two ten-minute plays for the Boston Theatre Marathon. (I have a number of stories about those years.) I've achieved the most success with my poetry, so far, having published in half-a-dozen magazines and had the one chapbook published (another is under consideration, and I've submitted a full-length ms. to a number of contests)."

Oct 28 Gary Metras: Founder of Adastra Press

Gary Metras is the author of the poetry books: The Night Watches, Destiny’s Calendar, and Until There Is Nothing Left (Ridgeway Press, 2003), along with eleven chapbooks, most recently, Greatest Hits 1980-2006 (Pudding House, 2007). His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as The American Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, The Bellingham Review, The Boston Review of Books, California Quarterly, Connecticut Poetry Review, English Journal, New England Watershed, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Sanctuary, Wild Earth, Yankee, and Tears in the Fence (UK), along with the recent anthologies Birth, Living Frost (Iowa 2002, 2005), and Proposing on Brooklyn Bridge (Grayson, 2003).

Metras is a past recipient of the Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry. Virginia Quarterly Review wrote of his long poem, Seagull Beach, “The book’s feel, heft, and contents are an evocative experience.” About his chapbook on teaching, Today’s Lesson, NEA Today [journal of the National Education Association] had written, “Who would have guessed that an ordinary school day can inspire extraordinary lyrical moments?....In [the title poem] “Today’s Lesson,” the simple question, ‘Can a good man do evil?’ leads readers into the magic connection between students and teacher and between Metras and his reader.” And the critic-poet, Robert Peters, in reviewing Destiny’s Calendar, said, “Metras writes moving meditations on our lives, and on his own. His language is direct and unpretentious. His music has a full and faultless sound....In almost every poem there is a surprising passage of insight....Metras is an authentic, unpretentious moving voice. These are poems to read aloud, linger over, and share with friends.” And Small Press Review said of Until There Is Nothing Left: “Metras is writing a mytho-poetry here of stones and bridges, water and our bodies, the outer and inner places, the landscapes of mind and heart....Again and again, the poet goes through the threshold of the daily into the aware life that lies somewhere beyond words yet is rendered in the poem.”

Gary Metras is the editor, publisher, and printer of Adastra Press, which specializes in hand crafted chapbooks of poetry. Adastra publishes 2-5 titles a year and has released 77 titles from 47 poets around the country. In reviewing several Adastra titles last year, the American Book Review said, “As long as fine literary presses continue to handcraft handsome books like these from Adastra, serious readers of the twenty-first century can rest assured, the book is alive and well.” And Contemporary Poetry Review, the online journal, has chosen Adastra as Publisher of the Year 2006 (July 2007). He has read his poems at bars, book stores, colleges and universities, including Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Detroit, and Kent State University. A native of Chicopee, Massachusetts, he has worked as a store clerk, tobacco picker, short order cook, hod carrier, air traffic controller (U. S. Air Force 1966-1970), book store manager, and high school English teacher. He holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Goddard College. When not busy writing, printing, or fly fishing (he is on the board of directors of the Pioneer Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited), Metras teaches writing at Springfield College and lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Oct 14, 2008 John Amen founder of "Pedestal Magazine"

Oct 14 5PM






John Amen is the author of two collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003) and More of Me Disappears (Cross-Cultural Communications 2005), and has released two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire (Cool Midget 2004, 2008). His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Rattle, The New York Quarterly, The International Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and Blood to Remember. He is also an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. Amen travels widely giving readings, doing musical performances, and conducting workshops. He founded and continues to edit the award-winning literary bimonthly, The Pedestal Magazine (www.thepedestalmagazine.com).

CD COLLINS OCT, 7 2008 5PM

Oct 7, 2008 C.D. Collins


With ever-shifting personae, CD Collins’ narratives and pyrotechnic poetics transport the listener from the hills of Kentucky, along the boulevard Champs-Elysees and to the urban landscape she now calls home.

Collins has performed in various Boston area venues including The Charles Playhouse, The Landsdowne Playhouse, and Club Passim, as well as appearing in poetry venues and academic settings along the East Coast, South and Midwest.

Ms. Collins' short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including StoryQuarterly, The Pennsylvania Review, Imagine, The South Dakota Review, Salamander and Phoebe. When accompanied by her band, Ms. Collins presents a captivating blend of Chamber Rock with Spoken Word that one reviewer described as “pure magic.”

Pincurl’s cassette Slow Burn was released in October 1997, followed by a compact disc, Kentucky Stories, released in March 1999 and funded by a grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. This disc won Best Spoken Word CD at the Boston Poetry Awards 2000.

Collins received two grants from the Somerville Arts Council — one in music, one in literature — and Cambridge Poetry Awards for Best Erotic Poem, Best Love Poem and Best Narrative Poem. The latter poem, “Promised Candy,” is included on her latest compact disc, Subtracting Down, a compilation of Post-Modern Mountain Storytelling & Song recorded with her band, Rockabetty. Also included on the CD is the track “Blood Orange,” which has been featured on the National Public Radio show “Here and Now.”

Five of CD’s poems — “The Fox, 1968,” “Promised Candy,” “Subtracting down,” “Self-Portrait with Severed Head,” and “Demimonde”—are included in the anthology The Boston Poet: Volume 1, Issue 1: Virgin Voyage.

Ms. Collins is an active member of The Writers’ Room of Boston.

She may be contacted at (617) 666-2778 or info@cdcollins.com.

Sept 9, 2008: Shirley Gerald Ware

9/9/08 5PM: Shirley Gerald Ware, is the author of three published books. She states:

" All three of my books �Just Kids,� �Somebody Too� and �The Final Goodbye� are available online at Amazom.com, from the publishers or you can order an autographed copy from the author. Besides, publishing books, Shirley is the publisher of Fresh! Literary Magazine, an online and quarterly publication of local and worldwide adults and teens writers of short stories, poetry and articles. Fresh! Literary Magazine was founded ten years ago and has since demonstrated tremendous growth worldwide. We�re nonprofit and therefore welcome donations of any amount. The author and publisher is accredited for writing numberless short stories, articles, book reviews and poems, many has won awards and honorable mentions."

Radio talk show host Maxine Thompson, "On the Same Page" interviewed her. Her current interview included her Editor, James Patrick Smith with Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon, and THE LITERATI SCENE. The show will be aired September 26, at 7:30pm and repeat September 27, at 10:30am. The interview will run on 18 different channels at different times in New England.

One of her poems title �My Mother�s Eyes,� has been accepted for publication in �Mom Writers Literary Magazine� in March. She has a bachelor�s degree in English Writing from Northeastern University. I am currently writing my fourth children book. Submissions are welcome or visit us online and enjoy a good read.We encourge our readers to send feedback, if you read something you like, we would love to hear about it.

Aug 19 5 Mario Barros

My guest Aug 19 5PM Mario Barros (Lenguaviva)

Mario Barros (Lenguaviva)

www.lenguaviva.org



ARTISTIC RESUME



Mario Barros (Lenguaviva) (Santa Clara, Cuba, 1953). Humorist, writer, actor and composer. Has combined his teaching and artistic careers in a successful way. In Cuba Mr. Barros co-wrote the college level textbook The Literature of the United States (Pueblo y Educación, La Habana, 1981). From 1985 to 1991 his satiric stories regularly appeared in Cuban newspapers and magazines. In 1987 he founded the comedy group Lenguaviva (“Living Language”) that gained an outstanding reputation in theater, radio and TV. Mr. Barros wrote more than seventy songs and skits for the Lenguaviva repertory and won two national comedy awards with the group. In the United States Mr. Barros directed the Somerville High School Drama Club for seven years and put more than twenty shows on stage with it. Five of those plays were written by him and have been collected under the title Five Insomniac Plays. Mr. Barros is also the author of the collection of short stories El color no cae del cielo (Galadriel Ediciones, Montevideo, 2007); the novel KleanKuts, Inc. and humorous commentaries published in several online magazines. Currently, again as Lenguaviva, Mr. Barros writes humorous commentaries in Spanish and English that have been published in Boston area papers El Mundo, Siglo21, El Planeta (where he also edits the humorous page El Bus de Lenguaviva), The Somerville Journal and The Somerville News. He has also written and conducted El Bus de Lenguaviva, a weekly radio show on WUNR Radio International, 1600 AM, Boston, and presents his one-man show CUENTAMETUVIDA (TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT) in venues throughout the Boston area. Book signing presentations have taken him to Santiago de Chile, Montevideo and Miami. In March 2008 The Boston Globe published an extensive article (Super Mario Barros) on his life and works. Mr. Barros resides in Massachusetts, where he came from Cuba in 1995

Aug 12, 2008: Bibliographer of Boston Literature:Gerald Richman

My guest on Aug 12 5PM will be Suffolk University English Professor Gerald Richman the creator of the online: Annotated Bibliography of Fiction Set in Boston.


Introduction

I. History


In the mid-1980s I inherited the Boston: A City in Fiction course at Suffolk University, Beacon Hill, Boston, from retiring colleague Ed Clark, who, in response to a call for relevance, had started the course in the 1960s along with courses on African-American literature. He passed on to me his reading list for the semester: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry James’s The Bostonians, Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure, Dan Wakefield’s Starting Over, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy, and novels for a term paper, William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham, James Carroll’s Mortal Friends, and Daniel Smith’s A Walk in the City. He also gave me a list including five additional “Novels by Black Writers Set, Wholly or Partially, in Boston.” These books formed the basis of the course I have taught for the last twenty years and for the Annotated Bibliography I compiled in my search for new readings for class and for student papers. By December 2007, Ed’s initial two-page reading list had grown to 40 pages. Since then, thanks to a sabbatical granted to me by the College of Arts and Sciences at Suffolk University for Spring semester 2008, the bibliography has grown to over two hundred pages with the addition of thousands of entries and detailed annotations.

Originally in typescript, with my expanding use of technology, the bibliography became a word processor file and by the mid-1990s a web page. Thanks to the excellent resources provided online by WorldCat, Google Books, Amazon, Internet Archives, Wikipedia, several universities, and many professional scholars and private devotees of romances, detective and suspense novels, and comic books, this bibliography is the most powerful I can imagine, providing for entries (when available) links to the full texts (especially useful for rare 18th, 19th, and early 20th century texts held only by a few research libraries), Library of Congress subject headings, and links to Amazon and Google Books for searchable texts, back covers, reviews and summaries, and scholarly analyses. To those of us who came of age before the Internet, the easy availability of these splendid resources is a modern miracle.

With so many details in a project like this, despite constant efforts, there are undoubtedly hundreds, indeed thousands, of errors. I would be very appreciative if users of this bibliography would email me (grichman@suffolk.edu) corrections,

Elizabeth Quinlan July 15 2008 5PM

My guest will be poet Elizabeth Quinlan whose new collection is titled: "Promise Supermarket" ( Ibbetson Street 2008) with an introduction by Martha Collins.

"As consciously and effectively as a short novel, Promise Supermarket depicts the life of a family moving ever downward, from a house on a hill to a one-room cellar apartment. . . . One of the marvels of this book is that Elizabeth Quinlan is able to depict the immense difficulties of her childhood with both quiet understatement and clear detail, allowing us to share her experience with the deep involvement that fully inhabiting a new literary space, however bleak, may give. . . . The magic of Promise Supermarket is to turn the power of visual imagination and memory into unforgettable stories—to “grow treasures” out of what was planted in the treeless ground of a difficult but tenderly remembered childhood. —Martha Collins, from the foreword

Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer With Doug Holder : The Interview

MEMBER PROFILE


Written by Vanessa Vartabedian


Ibbetson Street Press, which was originally started by Doug Holder and his wife Dianne out of their house on Ibbetson Street in Somerville in 1998, now resides at 25 School Street and has just published their 16th Issue of “Ibbetson Street”, a collection of poetry, with their 17th to be released soon. The publication started as a copied and stapled booklet of participating poets, and is now a properly bound publication that is discussed in college classrooms and collected in university libraries across the country. Ibbetson Street Press has also published many books and other collections of poetry along the way. I Refused to Die by Susie Davidson is their most recently acclaimed release, which centers around the testimonies of Boston-area Holocaust survivors.

A poet by desire and passion, Doug goes against the grain of the self-involved artist’s life by his continuous effort support and create opportunity for writers and poets to become published, and by creating a sense of community among his peers. He writes a column called “Lyrical Somerville” which appears in the back of The Somerville News and features different local poets, and is also on the Board of the Wilderness House Literary Retreat which is a new retreat for writers in Littleton, MA. Another way Doug reaches out to help poets and writers express their voice is with his cable access show, “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer” produced here at SCAT. Doug says that the show gives him the opportunity to “sit down and talk with strangers” which he said he otherwise finds very nerve-wracking. It also allows him license to inquire about their work and personal lives, and record it onto video. In this way, he creates a rich living history. The tapes are archived at Harvard and other libraries as a permanent record. His interviewees have included local and national legends in the poetry world including Diana Der-Hovanessian, who heads the New England Poetry Club, the recently deceased Robert Creeley, and Louisa Solano of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop (who had plenty of stories to share with Doug about her regular run-ins with Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell during their days at Harvard).

Doug has had his own poetry collections published by different presses and poetry magazines. In the fall his collection called Wrestling With My Father, about his relationship with his recently deceased father, will be released by a publisher in Pittsburgh.

For more information about Doug Holder and Ibbetson Street Press, you can visit his website at http://yahoogroups.com/group/ibbetsonstreetpressupdate. For a schedule of “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer”, visit our Programming page.



Somerville Community Access Television
90 Union Square, Somerville, MA 02143
Phone: 617-628-8826 | Fax: 617-628-1811

July 1 5PM Poet Tom Daley

July 1 2008 5PM Tom Daley is an instructor of poetry writing at the Online School of Poetry where he conducts workshops for poets and songwriters. In addition to his post at the Online School of Poetry, Tom Daley tutors beginning and experienced poets in person and by correspondence and teaches poetry writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education in Boston, Massachusetts and poetry and memoir writing at Lexington (MA) Community Education. He has been a guest instructor in ekphrastic writing at Brown University and in poetry writing and performance at Stonehill College and SUNY Cobleskill. Tom led last fall’s poetry writing workshops and classes at the Writers In the Round annual retreat for songwriters and poets on Star Island (Rye, New Hampshire) and a workshop in the creative process at the Nantucket Athenaeum.
He is a member of the award-winning poetry performance troupe, Doc Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show. In April of 2004, He produced and performed in “The Musician and the Muse,” an evening of performance poetry inspired by music and musicians from Bach to Betty Carter, from Robert Johnson to Janis Joplin at the Cambridge [MA] Multicultural Arts Center.

Tom Daley’s poetry is forthcoming or has been published in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Diagram, 32 Poems, Salamander, Archipelago, Perihelion, Poetry Ireland Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Passages North and Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology. His manuscript, Shim, was a semi-finalist for the 2004 Bakeless Prize and a finalist for the 2005 Emily Dickinson First Book Prize offered by The Poetry Foundation. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize.

Tuesday June 10 5PM Poet Dale Patterson

On June 10 2008 5PM Dale Patterson will be our guest. Dale is a published poet (Honorable mention in the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award 2007). Dale is also the Manager of Development and Communications for the Boston Public Library Foundation, a grant writer, an instructor at Simmons College in Boston, and former member of the board of Somerville Community Access TV.

Poet Hugh Fox June 3 5PM

My guest June 3 5PM will be poet, critic, anthropolgist, translator, playwright, iconoclast: Hugh Fox.




Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He spent his childhood studying violin, piano, composition and opera with his Viennese teacher Zerlina Muhlman Metzger. He received a M.A. degree in English from Loyola University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He met his first wife, a Peruvian woman named Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos, while at Urbana-Campaign and was a Professor of American Literature from 1958-1968 at Loyola University in Los Angeles. He became a Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University in 1968 and remained there until he retired in 1999. It was at MSU that he met his second wife Nona Grimes. They were married in 1970. He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Católica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. They've been married for 28 years. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires on and OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986.

May 27 2008-- Poet Eva Salzman

My guest May 27, 2008 at 5PM Is poet EVA SALZMAN:



Eva Salzman grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island where she was a dancer/choreographer. At Stuyvesant H.S., her teacher was Frank McCourt, and later, at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she received her MFA, she studied with Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, C.K. Williams, Edmund White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Stephen Sandy and Jorie Graham. Her books include The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe) Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford) and, One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press), illus. Van Howell, all Poetry Book Society Recommendations/Special Commendations.

Her grandmother was a child vaudeville actress, and her mother is an environmentalist. This background, and a diverse range of jobs - as Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet centre, out-of-print book searcher and cleaner of rich ladies' houses - all inform her writing, especially her cross-arts projects with performers and visual artists. She has collaborated with the director Rufus Norris and with composers Gary Carpenter, Rachel Leach, Philip Cashian and A.L. Nicolson. Shawna and Ron's Half Moon: An Americana Satire and One Two, commissioned by the English National Opera Studio, were performed there, at Hoxton Hall and at Greenwich Theatre. Cassandra, a mini-opera written with her composer father, Eric Salzman, has been performed in Dusseldorf, Vienna and Oslo. She won 2nd Prize in the National Poetry Competition and major prizes in the Arvon and Cardiff Poetry Competitions. Grants and awards include those from the Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund, London Arts Board and the Society of Authors

Her work has frequently been broadcast on BBC radio, and has read her work at the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican, Poetry Society, Troubadour and at festivals all over the UK, as well as in Ireland, Spain and France. In the US, she has read at the Nuyorican Café, the Walt Whitman Association and at Wesleyan Writers' Conference, where she also taught, as a Fellow two years running. Her varied teaching work has included Adjunct Professor at Friends World Programme (Long Island University, London, regular teaching for the Arvon courses, for community projects in London's East End and a residency at Springhill Prison, as well as continuing work for the Poetry Society's educational programmes, and co-devising the Open University's first Start Writing Poetry course.

Her poetry, fiction and features have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon, Review, Independent, Guardian, Observer, Poetry Review, TLS, London Magazine, and in the anthologies: The Firebox ed. Sean O'Brien; Hand in Hand ed. Carol Ann Duffy; Sixty Women Poets ed. Linda France; Last Words eds. Don Paterson & Jo Shapcottl; and two New Writing anthologies (British Council/Picador/Vintage) eds. John Fowles, A.L. Kennedy, Penelope Lively & George Szirtes.

She holds a West Midlands Writing Fellowship at Warwick University, where she's taught the Poetry MA, and a Royal Literary Fund Project Fellowship at Ruskin College, Oxford. Currently, she is editing an anthology of Ruskin (Oxford) work, writing fiction and an opera for Buxton Festival 2005 (composer: Ian McQueen). Her latest book, Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 2004) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She now lives in London.