Michael Keith and Greg Wolos discuss their new books.... Dec 14, 2022

 Michael Keith will discuss his collection of flash fiction "Quiet Geography." Greg Wolos will discuss his collection of short stories " Green Ray and other Stories."

Tom Laughlin: "The Rest of the Way"

 

TOM LAUGHLIN is a professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts where he teaches creative writing, literature, and composition courses, as well as coordinating the MCC Visiting Writers Series and open readings for students, faculty, and community members for the Creative Writing Program. He also coordinated the Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Middlesex Community College for many years; coordinated an Early Academic Intervention Program, the Writing Center, and creative writing activities at Massasoit Community College for nearly a decade; and taught literature classes in two Massachusetts prisons.

His poetry chapbook, The Rest of the Way, was released by Finishing Line Press in August 2022.

Guests September 7 Victor Wallis and Inez Hedges

 Victor Wallis and Inez Hedges will talk about their new books--- Socialist Practice by Wallis and Staging History from the Shoah to Palestine by Hedges.

Aug 24, 2022 Poet Mike Ansara author of "What Remains"

 

Michael Ansara, Poet

Founder of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, Michael Ansara’s first book of poems, “What Remains”, was published by Kelsay Books in 2022. Michael spent many years as an activist and an organizer starting with the civil rights movement of the 1960’s, going on to be a regional organizer for SDS. He spent 10 years organizing opposition to the war in Vietnam. For 15 years, Michael worked as a community organizer including directing Mass Fair Share. He has worked on political campaigns, coordinated voter registration efforts, and trained many organizers. He owned and ran two successful businesses. He currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Redress Movement and the organizing team for Together We Elect. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and his essays have appeared in Vox, Arrowsmith, Solstice and Cognoscenti. He is currently working on a memoir. He lives in Carlisle, MA, with his wife Barbara Arnold and dotes on his three children and six grandchildren.

Lawrence Millman July 6 5PM Live!

 

Lawrence Millman is a man of many talents. As an author, he has written 16 books, including such titles as Last Places, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, An Evening Among Headhunters, Lost in the Arctic, and — most recently:

Goodbye, Ice: Arctic Poems (2020)

The Book of Origins (2019)

At the End of the World: A True Story of Murder in the Arctic (2016)

Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer (2013)

Hiking to Siberia (2012)

Fascinating Fungi of New England (2011)

As a mycologist, he has studied fungi all over the world, but especially in his own backyard of New England. And as an explorer, he has made over 40 trips and expeditions to the Arctic and Subarctic. The photo shows him in a contemplative mood on a beach in Siberia.

May 8, 2022 Poet Kevin Gallagher discusses his new collection The Wild Goose

 

The Wild Goose by Kevin Gallagher

Book Description

The Wild Goose was a hand-made magazine of verse written and edited by John Boyle O’Reilly aboard the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport British convicts to Australia. O’Reilly (1844-1890) was an Irish Fenian sentenced to life imprisonment for infiltrating the British army and attempted mutiny. O’Reilly escaped from Australia aboard a whaling ship and settled in Boston where he rose to become an editor of The Pilot, a noted poet, and abolitionist.

In a sense, these poems are a little magazine conceived of and drafted in 2018 and 2019 when Gallagher was a poet-in-residence at the Heinrich Boll Cottage, on Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland. In addition to a sequence on O’Reilly, the poems in this book engage the Irish landscape, and the history and myth that formed the identity of some of the Gallagher’s ancestors until British colonialism and associated famine took them to Massachusetts.

Commentary

Kevin Gallagher’s new book begins with Irish myth and ends with his own myth, as he visits his father in a classically tinged underworld. Using a variety of poetic forms, Gallagher creates a blend of Irish-American family experience and Irish history that features both his father and a colorful nineteenth-century Irishman who ended up in America. This poetic blend of the poet’s imaginings, memories, and careful research is absorbing, entertaining, and enlightening. —Martha Collins, author of Because What Else Could I Do?

Kevin Gallagher shows us how his sense of an Irish identity is more than a hand-me-down, that it depends on an unflinching examination of the ways voices from the past—not all of them benevolent—shape who we are and how we see the world. Gallagher imagines an array of such voices, from figures in pre-Christian myths to historical figures who resisted British colonialism. The arc of the collection aims, however, toward the present, to the Irish-American experience as well as what the poet sees and hears in Ireland today. The culmination of The Wild Goose comes in a dream-vision in which the poet is granted access to the afterlife and meets his deceased father. Says that father to his grieving son: “Let me hear you talk. I’ll talk to you too.” Crystalline imagery and carefully crafted lyrics embody Gallagher’s difficult and demanding dialogue with the long and often painful story of the culture he comes from. —Fred Marchant, author of Said Not Said.

To over-underscore how Kevin Gallagher delves into Celtic mythology from the get-go with the wonderful love-poem “Birth of a Nation” and plumbs the raw contemporary ring of those legendary, gender-bendering heroes and heroines—Eithlinn and Cian, Deirdre and Diarmuid, Lir, Cairbre, Bres, all that—might be to miss the larger project, all-in, this collection’s vast and variegated canvas stretched beyond history and in your face. In The Wild Goose you will find and lose, often in the same breath, your compass points, become a bit, as the French say, déboussolé. All in a good way. Unmoored, not plot-lost. Gallagher’s poems read exquisitely and easily. With a preference for nifty, drop-stitch, loose-iambic couplets, villanelles that hypnose, The Wild Goose runs riot in lyric narrative gear, its best poems top-shelf distillations of story and meditation. And you won’t find many affirmations of a redemptive immigration policy that welcomes refugees finer than the sonnet sequence “The Journal of John Boyle O’Reilly.” —Aidan Rooney, author of Go There

Mystery Writer Dale Phillips Sunday Mach 20 3PM

Dale T Phillips is a New England writer, spent his formative years in Maine, and has lived and worked in a number of different places. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono, studied writing with Stephen King, and has worked for over twenty-five years as a Technical Writer in a number of major industries, translating the work of software developers into clear instructions for using computer software.

Before that, he’s worked as a farm laborer, entrepreneurial bait salesman, yard worker, golf pro shop assistant, factory assembler, clean room machine operator, holiday Santa, construction worker, hotel worker, office assistant, theater apprentice, busboy, waiter, bartender, wine steward, assistant maitre’d, website designer, lab experiment subject, and blackjack dealer.

He has published novels, over 70 short stories, collections, articles, jokes, and poetry, and has appeared on stage, television, and in Throg, an independent feature film:

Aine Griffin: author of the collection " A Foreign Home" Feb 5, 2022

 

“Áine Griffin’s A Foreign Home is an unfettered and undeterred accounting of life: life that hurts, life that hopes, life that fears, life that loves, life that scars. These poems reach into the earthy experiences of late night dances and early morning sunshine. They pulse with reality and spark with the divine. A.E. Housman once claimed that ‘poetry is not the thing said, but a way of saying it.’ Griffin’s work, here, is a mesmerizing, brilliant, and deeply affecting way of saying it.”

— Luke Reynolds, Assistant Professor of Education at Endicott College and author of Fantastic Failures: People Who Changed the World by Falling Down First, Surviving Middle School: Navigating the Halls, Riding the Social Roller Coaster, and Unmasking the Real You, and many others

Interview with Mark Pawlak about his new book Deniversity: January 4, 2022

 
Poet Mark Pawlak's life and times with noted poet Denise Levertov....

My Deniversity:

Knowing Denise Levertov

Much more than the story of Mark Pawlak’s apprenticeship to a major poet (Denise Levertov), My Deniversity is a brilliant and delightful introduction to what it means to commit one’s self to Poetry, capital P. Guided by Levertov, aspiring physicist Mark Pawlak turned himself into an important American poet and co-editor of Hanging Loose, one of the country’s longest lived and most influential literary presses. Open-hearted, witty, and genuinely instructive, the book is simultaneously a reminiscence, a social history of a singular period in American letters, and an insider’s guide to the craft. My Deniversity belongs on the shelf alongside Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Pound’s ABC of Reading.

—Askold Melnyczuk, author of The Man Who Would Not Bow, founder of Agni.

Nov 7 2021 Interview with Paul Marion "Lockdown Letters"

 Opening with a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lockdown Letters & Other Poems ranges near and far in the author’s catalogue. While spared the devastating effects of the disease, he offers a view of the way daily life changes and new risks are confronted as people try to maintain routines. The book shifts to work inspired by travel—local, global, and beyond—routes giving rise to memorable observations and insights. More place poems and a cycle of sports pieces round out the volume, with its theme of home-and-away

Friday Sept 25 Poet to Poet Paul Steven Stone Souljourner

 

Where to start with Souljourner? Let’s start with the author - Paul Steven Stone is either a madman or a genius – probably both – and he’s written one of the most gripping and enjoyable books we’ve ever come across. It begins with a quote from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey, we are spiritual beings on a human journey.”– and that my friends sets the tone for everything that’s to come.David Rockwood Worthington is in prison serving a life sentence for the murder of his 3rd wife and his incarceration is not going smoothly.He’s being terrorised by rival gangs who insist he owes them each $6 million dollars – debts of which David claims to be entirely unaware. This perilous situation is complicated by the fact that the Internal Revenue Service wants to talk to him about the $18 million dollars he has stashed in secret Cayman Island accounts – accounts which David also claims to be entirely unaware of. On top of all that, his prison psychologist doesn’t seem to like him very much. The central premise of this novel - if it is indeed a novel (the narrator insists it is in fact a warning letter from your soul’s previous incarnation) - is that our souls make their eternal journey towards enlightenment in the company of a single unchanging ‘karmic pod’ of companion souls who take on different roles in each of our incarnations.In one life a soul may appear as your mother, in the next your best friend, in the next your sworn enemy, in the next your lover and so on for eternity.The identities of the souls in your ‘karmic pod’ are hidden from you in life – this letter/novel seeks to wise you up to who’s who in your karmic pod to help you avoid making the same mistakes that landed our David in prison.Souljourner is a cult-classic in the making. It is by turns bizarre, bewildering, hilarious, infuriating and utterly engaging – strap yourself in and prepare to be swept up in this extraordinary karmic rollercoaster of a book.

June 13, 3PM Paul Marion: author of the collection Lockdown Letters and Other Poems

Paul Marion is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches and editor of Jack Kerouac's early writing, Atop an Underwood. His book Mill Power documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Mass. His recent work has appeared in So It Goes, Café Review, SpoKe Seven, and PoetsReadingtheNews.com. He lives in the Merrimack River Valley of Massachusetts.

Opening with a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lockdown Letters & Other Poems ranges near and far in the author's catalogue. While spared the devastating effects of the disease, he offers a view of the way daily life changes and new risks are confronted as people try to maintain routines. The book shifts to work inspired by travel—local, global, and beyond—routes giving rise to memorable observations and insights. More place poems and a cycle of sports pieces round out the volume, with its theme of home-and-away.

Praise for Paul Marion's Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017)

"Marion gets the expansiveness, the inclusiveness, the diversity, the eclecticism, and the influence of our country . . . . he paints it all with his artful choice of words."

—Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

"Reading Union River, you are reminded why poems matter. When done right they are keys to locks we didn't know could be opened, throwing wide windows and doors that lead us to places we never thought we'd go."

—Merrimack Valley Magazine

"Paul Marion's Union River is a worthy inclusion in the great American songbook . . . . These are fine poems and damned good stories."

—Today's Book of Poetry (Canada)

Sunday May 23 3PM Novelist Ellen Meister

 

Meister writes:

I started my career as a copywriter, working on staff and then later as a freelancer. All along, I had dreams of becoming a novelist. That came true in 2006 with the publication of my first book.

Now, I proudly welcome my sixth book, LOVE SOLD SEPARATELY (Mira, August 2020). My previous novels are DOROTHY PARKER DRANK HERE (Putnam 2015), FAREWELL, DOROTHY PARKER (Putnam 2013), THE OTHER LIFE (Putnam 2011), THE SMART ONE (HarperCollins 2008) and SECRET CONFESSIONS OF THE APPLEWOOD PTA (HarperCollins 2006). Some career highlights include appearances on NPR, being selected for the prestigious Indie Next List by the American Booksellers Association, foreign language translations of my books, and receiving a TV series option from HBO. My nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal blog, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Long Island Woman, Writer's Digest and more.

I teach creative writing privately and at Long Island University Hutton House, and also offer editorial and ghostwriting services

As a public speaker, I offer lectures on writing-related topics, and on Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table. I’m also the voice of Dorothy Parker on Facebook.

May 9th 3PM: Poet and Short Fiction Writer Carolyn Kingyens

 

Carolynn Kingyens’ Bio 

I was born and raised in Northeast Philadelphia, a section of the city called “Parkwood,” a predominantly blue collar, Catholic neighborhood consisting of mid-50’s style brick row houses in domino-like configurations that were prone to chronic leaks. I am the youngest of seven children, of Italian descent.

It was an awesome neighborhood to be a kid in the eighties. We’d play games like stick ball, wire ball, Freedom, and when we got a little older, Spin the Bottle and Seven Minutes in Heaven -  in the closets at basement birthday parties. One of my favorite memories as a kid was attending St. Anselm Parish carnivals every Spring. It was our neighborhood’s version of Disney World. 

One of the rites of passage, in Parkwood, was to go explore the ruins and underground tunnels of “Byberry” (Byberry Mental Hospital), these creepy, turn-of-century decaying buildings with a morbid past of patient abuse and cover-ups. We’d be gone for hours, back before there were cell phones and helicopter parents. 

I wrote an essay about Byberry, coining ourselves “The Goonies of Northeast Philly.” It was published last year in the Brooklyn-based arts and culture magazine - Across the Margin. 

My parents would leave Catholicism for Evangelical Christianity sometime after my Christening, in the mid-to-late ‘70s, and this caused a chasm, at least for a while, within my extended family and neighborhood. It was a different time back then, a time when people tended to create families and communities around their own faith. After a while, it started to feel, unconsciously, of course, Us and Them, Them and Us.

I highlighted this Us/Them feeling in a poem written back in 2008. It was published in a now defunct online arts journal.

I think before I was a poet and writer, I was an observer. But I didn’t become an observer until I felt like I was on the outside of something, and that chasm created, after my family left Catholicism, caused my childhood world to shift some. I was also a very sensitive child, and could walk into a room and feel other people’s vibes, good or bad. Let’s just say I knew where I was welcomed, and where I wasn’t so observation and intuition became that steady ground for me in a not so steady world. 

It was around the sixth grade that I started carrying one of my brothers’ busted up Walkmans with me for all those long bus rides to my private Christian school. I’d found that listening to music would often soothe my growing anxiety, along with being a quasi-companion. 

I always say that music was my first teacher of poetry. I can remember going to Sam Goody to buy Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes in 1992, then afterwards going home to lie on my daybed, where I’d read her poetic, angst-filled lyrics along to her music. Songs like “Winter,” “Silent All These Years,” “Me and a Gun” and “Precious Things” - 

Some of the music I was listening to back then, and still listen to today, include, of course, Tori Amos, Counting Crows, Ani DiFranco, Radiohead, Joy Division and New Order, Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre, Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Tom Waits to name a few.

In 1995, I started hanging out with an older writer-friend, someone who’d shared my taste in music and independent films. In a way, he’d become a mentor without being a mentor. He was the one who’d hand me a copy of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, telling me to read it.

I was never a reader up to this point, and this book was over 600 pages. Who was he kidding, I’d thought. But I took it home anyway, and read the entire book within a few days. I couldn’t put it down, and even cried at the end because I’d become so vested in the central characters. Next, I read three more Irving novels, back-to-back, and then moved on to J.D. Salniger, Saul Bellow, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, the Beat poets. I would even go on to read The Way of The Pilgrim, the 19th century Russian work, that pea green-colored book Franny obsesses over in her quasi-existential breakdown in Salinger’s classic, Franny & Zooey.

Something happened at the intersection of observation, music, mentor and literature - writing happened, starting first with poetry.

In 1996, I started writing poetry, and had a few poems published in ‘97 and ‘98. It was around this time that I started writing short fiction as well. My first short story was entitled “Redneck Love.” I lost the hardcopy, the only copy I had, in one of my many moves.

I got married to my best friend and soulmate in 1999, and we both came from humble roots. I’d hoped to get an MFA, but put that dream on hold while we both worked and saved for a family. I stumbled into the field of business development when I found out that I had a knack for cold calling. 

This knack for cold calling began as a shoe idea back when I was a fashion design student at Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science, Fall of ‘93. The shoe idea came about because I didn’t like carrying a purse, still dont today. So the heel of the shoe would carry things. For example, a sneaker’s heel would act similarly to the ‘90s CD tray, where you push a little side button and a custom tray would slide out like a CD would and there would be a key and a money holder. Chunky-heel boots would sell with lipstick in the heel compartment. A  hiking boot heel hid a Swiss Army knife, bandaids, etc. The name of this idea was “Sole Keepers.” 

I’d met, and later went to work for, a creative entrepreneur, who’d go on to financially invest in “Sole Keepers.” He hired a patent attorney, and in the meantime, I would be cold calling VP’s of shoe companies such as Candies, Kenneth Cole, Nine West, FUBU, JCPenney, Steve Madden and Sketchers. We flew to New York, where we’d meet with decision makers and had prototypes made. It was an exciting time. And then, sadly,  9/11 happened shortly after, followed by the shoe bomber. The idea got permanently shelved. 

So for the next eight years, I stopped writing, and worked a series of sales jobs, becoming a chronic “clock watcher.” There were some aspects I’d enjoyed but sales was never a real passion. Writing was my passion, but during this time in my life, I was stuck in a creative wasteland. Nothing was happening, writing-wise. But in 2008, I started writing poetry again, and my poetry started to get published. 

Encouraged, I kept writing, even after I’d become a mother in 2010 and again in 2011, welcoming two beautiful daughters, both named after literary characters. I’d write poetry during their naps and into the evening while they were sleeping. And since the pandemic, I still write late at night while my girls are sleeping.

In the Fall of 2014, my family and I moved to New York, and that was when a real creative awakening started to happen, albeit slowly, at first. 

In 2018, I decided to put a manuscript together that would include poems written between 2008 - 2019. The first draft had a different title and direction. In the Fall of that same year, I took two back-to-back online poetry workshops with 24 Pearl Street, taught by brilliant poet, Peter Campion. 

In the Spring of 2019, I took a three month, peer-led poetry workshop.  By Fall, I’d felt more confident that my manuscript was finally complete. The new title would be Before the Big Bang Makes a Sound. The collective voice in this collection is intuitive, an outsider and observer, navigating a way through heartbreak, freakish accidents, ghosts, regret, illness while set against the beautiful, gritty landscape of New York.

Two weeks after sending my manuscript to a plethora of publishers, I would receive a book contract from Kelsay Books. I was in the middle of cooking dinner with my laptop atop of the granite counter, next to the stove, when I noticed the acceptance email popped up in my inbox. I started screaming with excitement, jumping up and down. My younger daughter immediately ran over to give me a big hug. My husband gave me a high five. It was definitely my “Rocky” moment. 

Channeling those old, cold calling days, I started to reach out to a bunch of New York City bookstores, including Barnes & Noble in Brooklyn, before my book was even released. Every bookstore I reached out to was super supportive, and said they would carry my debut book. I was beyond thankful and appreciative. 

Barnes & Noble had my debut book on their “Brooklyn Stories” display at the front of the store, right next to Paul Auster’s novel, The Brooklyn Follies and Jonathan Lethem’s novel, Motherless Brooklyn. It was a surreal moment for sure. In addition, Barnes & Noble would go on to do a generous instagram post in February 2020, writing this: 

"Contemporary, urban, and impassioned, Carolynn Kingyens’ poetry resonates with a darkening echo still felt long after the first read."

During the initial quarantine, and the months that ensued, I started writing short fiction again after being encouraged by a novelist-friend.  I've found that I love writing short fiction as much as I love writing poetry. This past year, I would go on to write six short stories that all got published. My most recent story is “The Peggy Effect.”

https://acrossthemargin.com/the-peggy-effect/

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

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

Sunday March 7 3PM Michael Seth Stewart editor of Yours Presently: The Selected Letters of John Wieners

 

AMerican poet John Wieners is thoroughly disenfranchised from the modern poetic establishments because he is, to those institutions, practically illegible. He was a queer self-styled poete maudit in the fifties; a protege of political-historical poet Charles Olson who wrote audaciously personal verse; a lyric poet who eschewed the egoism of the confessional mode in order to pursue the Olsonian project of Projective (outward-looking) poetics; a Boston poet who was institutionalized at state hospitals. Wieners lived on the "other side" of Beacon Hill, not the Brahmin south slope, but the north side with its working-class apartments and underground gay bars. Though Wieners' work is considered preeminent by many of the second half of the century's most important poets, the ahistoricizing process of literary canon-building has kept him at the fringes of not just the canon, but the established taxonomy of the all the great post-war undergrounds - the mimeo revolution, the San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, New York, and Boston poetry communities that he moved through. Why was Wieners so disenfranchised? How can we make him manifest within the discourses of twentieth-century poetry?

Poet David Daniel Sunday April 14, 2021

 

David Daniel is the author of Seven-Star Bird, from Graywolf Press, winner of the Levis Reading Prize, and his new collection, Ornaments, in the Pitt Poetry Series. Critic Harold Bloom has called him “an authentic heir to Hart Crane” and poet Tom Sleigh writes that “No one in any generation is writing poems that are like this: smart, visceral, immensely pleasurable to read.” Former long-time poetry editor of Ploughshares, Daniel founded and produces WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, which has brought together Bruce Springsteen with Robert Pinsky, Rosanne Cash with C. D. Wright, Talib Kweli with Quincy Troupe, along with over forty major artists for collaborative performances and conversations. He’s been on the Core Faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and he teaches creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He lives in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Sunday Jan. 24 Doug Holder interviews Christine Tierney about her debut book of poetry chicken+lowercase=fleur,

 

Christine Tierney wants you to know she has three kidneys, and that it’s okay to ask her how and why. Her debut collection of poetry, chicken+lowercase=fleur, is available for pre-sale at Lily Poetry Review Books, and her (in progress) manuscript, make me unsick, was a finalist for the for the Gambling the Aisle Chapbook Competition and the Slate Roof Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and the Best New Poets Anthology, and has been published in Fourteen Hills, Poet Lore, PMS, The Tusculum Review, Permafrost, Sugar House Review and many other fab places. Hailing from Boston, she lives with her wicked cool drummer husband, and works as an afterschool director where she encourages kids to embrace their weirdness. She has a BA in film from Emerson College, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast Writing Program. Christine is a funk, disco and kitty lover, as well as a wannabe comedian. 

Doug Holder Interviews Poet Gary Margolis--Dec, 2020

 

Gary Margolis is the author of four poetry books: Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems (Bauhan Publishing, 2013); Fire in the Orchard (Autumn House Press, 2002), which was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Falling Awake (University of Georgia Press, 1986); and The Day We Still Stand Here (University of Georgia Press, 1983).

A Robert Frost Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a recipient of a Vermont Council on the Arts award, Margolis has published his poems in Poetry, American Scholar, Poetry Northwest, and other literary magazines.

A licensed psychologist, Margolis is the former executive director of counseling and former associate professor of English at Middlebury College in Vermont. He lives in Cornwall, Vermont, where he is a volunteer firefighter.

Nov. 22, 2020 Doug Holder interviews poet Durane West

 

I am going to be interviewing poet Durane West this afternoon at 3PM.

He writes:

I write spoken word poetry that paints the perspective of an innercity black boy from Boston, MA. Raised in the city, he went to Boston Public Schools through high school. Winner of the Max Warburg Courage Essay Contest in 2001, Durane has been a frequent member of open mic scenes since 2017. He has performed at local spots like Haley House, Lizard Lounge, and Cantab Lounge among others. He is currently working toward creating his first chapbook. A former tour guide at Fenway Park, Durane works for an education non-profit that supports BPS students."