Featured Readers at ALL

March 19, 2009
An inn-keeper, a mother, a basketball coach, Lisa Starr, Rhode Island’s Poet Laureate, tries to balance her time among a variety of interests, her family, and her passion for poetry. She is a two-time recipient of the R.I. Fellowship for Poetry. In her capacity as Poet Laureate, Starr is generating a statewide poetry pen-pal system which creates and then partners writing circles among student and elderly communities around the state. She has also established poetry circles in hospitals, homeless shelters, the state prison, and agencies for children and adults with severe mental and physical disabilities. Her third collection, Mad With Yellow, was published in September, 2009. She is the author of two other books: This Place Here (2001) and Days of Dogs and Driftwood (1993). Starr is the founder and director of the Block Island Poetry Project, the nationally acclaimed celebration of poetry, the arts and humanity, now in its 6th year. With the help of husband Champlin, children Orrin (12) and Millie (11), and Brother the Dog, Starr operates the Hygeia House, a 10-room inn on Block Island. When time permits, she writes her heart out.

February 19, 2009
Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove), named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, a collaborative chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). His creative and critical work has previously appeared in such publications as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The Massachusetts Review, Fulcrum, McSweeney's and AWP's The Writer's Chronicle, among many others. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has appeared as a commentator on NPR, BBC and Wesleyan Radio and read his work in many places, including the Asia Society, St. Mark's Poetry Project and the National Arts Club. He currently serves on the Advisory Council for the Connecticut Center for the Book and along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond (W.W Norton & Co.)

January 15, 2009
Alison D. Moncrief was raised in northern Connecticut. She has a Master's degree in English Literature from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and is a recent graduate of the MFA program for poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Caduceus, The Connecticut River Review, and The Paris Review. She teaches English at the Foote School and Southern Connecticut State University. Alison is also a contributing poetry editor for the on-line literary journal Drunken Boat. She lives in New Haven now with her husband Andy Bromage and with two cats in the yard.

December 18, 2008
Michael R. Brown has published poetry, fiction, travel articles and columns in wide-ranging periodicals all over the world. His fourth book of poetry, The Confidence Man, was published in 2006 by Ragged Sky. Falling Wallendas (Chicago: Tia Chucha, 1994) is in its second printing of a thousand. The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides (Newton, CT: Hanover Press, 2003) won the 2004 Cambridge Poetry Award for best book. Susquehanna (Princeton: Ragged Sky, 2003) consists mostly of persona poems of the people of the small towns of Marietta and Columbia, Lancaster County, PA, where he grew up. That book was runnerup in the Cambridge Awards and is soon to be sold out.

Brown holds a Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan. His dissertation was a literary history of the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance directed by Robert Hayden. For 46 years he taught at high schools and universities from the South Side of Chicago to South Korea.

Since 1989 Brown has been active in poetry slams, performing in Europe as well as North America. For 13 years he hosted the Boston slam at the Cantab Lounge, Cambridge, and he appears in the film SlamNation. He is co-producer of The Culture of Peace, an international exhibit of art and poetry organized under the UN mandate for a decade of the Culture of Peace. He was general secretary of the Poetry Olympics, first held in Stockholm in 1998. He produced and directs Dr. Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show, a poetry ensemble performing their poetry in theaters.

After moving to Down East Maine in 2007, Brown and his partner Valerie Lawson have begun a monthly reading series and taken over the poetry journal Off the Coast. He covers the Passamaquoddy reservation and health issues for the local newspaper and directs and performs in local theater. For a complete resume see http://michael.brown.name

November 20, 2008
Eric Ting is Associate Artistic Director at Long Wharf Theatre. Recent directing credits include Anna Deavere Smith's Let Me Down Easy (ART), The Bluest Eye (Hartford Stage / Long Wharf Theatre), Underneath the Lintel (LWT, 05/06 Connecticut Critics Circle awards for Best Director and Best Production of a Play) and The Little Prince (Round House Theatre). Upcoming: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (also, co-adapting) and Theresa Rebeck's Bad Dates (both LWT); also, Donald Margulies' Shipwrecked! An Entertainment… (Shakespeare Santa Cruz).

Ting's work has been presented internationally, including France, Canada, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Bali. Original plays include Rwanda: A Vaudeville, Comfort Women and Miss Waldron's Red Colobus. Awards and grants include a 2004-2006 TCG New Generations Future Leaders fellowship and the 06/07 Jerome & Roslyn Milstein Meyer Career Development Prize.

September 18, 2008
John Surowiecki
John Surowiecki is the author of two books of poetry, The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats and Watching Cartoons Before Attending a Funeral, as well as five chapbooks. He has won a number of prizes, including the Nimrod Pablo Neruda Prize and the silver medal in the last Sunken Garden Poetry Festival National Competition.

A new collection, Barney and Gienka, will appear next year, and his Tapeworm Comics, a poem in comic book form, will be published by Ugly Duckling Presse in the fall. His verse drama, My Nose and Me: A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes, won a Poetry Foundation Pegasus Award. The play will be produced in Chicago next spring and at the University of Connecticut on November 13.

Publications include: Alaska Quarterly Review, The Alembic, Cadillac Cicatrix, Gargoyle, Indiana Review , Margie, Nimrod, New Zoo Poetry Review, Poetry, Redivider, Silk Road, West Branch and Xanadu.

February 15, 2008
Richard Deming and Michael Kelleher
Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist who works on the philosophy of literature. His first collection of poems, Let's Not Call It Consequence, has just appeared from Shearsman. His book, Listening on All Sides: Towards an Emersonian Ethics of Reading, was recently published by Stanford University Press. His poems have appeared in such journals as Sulfur, Field, Kiosk, Mandorla, and in the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. With Nancy Kuhl, he edits Phylum Press. He is currently a lecturer at Yale University.

Michael Kelleher is the author of two collections of poems: Human Scale (BlazeVOX, 2007) and
To Be Sung (BlazeVOX, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared at the Poetry Foundation Website, The Brooklyn Rail, Ecopoetics, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and others. With Ammiel Alcalay, he runs 'OlsonNow,' a project (events and a blog) dedicated to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. He lives in Buffalo, NY, where he works as Artistic Director of Just Buffalo Literary Center.

January 18, 2008
Allyson Wuerth and Mark Stricker
Allyson Wuerth received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh, following a residency at Bucknell University’s Stadler Semester for Younger Poets. She has published poems in journals including Cimarron Review, 5 A.M., and Connecticut Review. In 2005, she was named Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English.

Mark Stricker is the co-editor of the online journal nanomajority. His poems have appeared in Sidereality, Muse Apprentice Guild, Tin Lustre Mobile, Word/For Word, Fell Swoop, Royal Vagrant Review, and Perihelion. He lives in Hamden, Connecticut.

December 21, 2007
Cameron K. Gearon and Suzanne Heyd
Cameron K. Gearen was born in New Haven and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois.  She has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative to Day and selected by Robert Pinsky (2004).  Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere.  She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Contest in 2001 and the 2005 Lynda Hull Prize from Crazyhorse.

Suzanne Heyd is a freelance writer and lives in New Haven. Her work appears in recent and forthcoming issues of Third Coast, jubilat, Open City, Sonora Review, New Orleans Review, Gulf Stream, Puerto del Sol, Washington Square, Northwest Review, Nimrod International and elsewhere. A chapbook, Crawl Space is just out from Phylum Press.  Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

November 16, 2007
Julie Carr and Anthoney Hawley
Julie Carr's second collection of poetry, Equivocal, was recently published by Alice James Books. Her first book, Mead: An Epithalamion, won the University of Georgia Press's contemporary poetry prize for 2004. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Volt, American Letters and Commentary, Pool, Verse, The Iowa Review, Boston Review, and TriQuarterly. She lives in Denver and teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Anthony Hawley is the author of The Concerto Form and Autobiography / Oughtabiography. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, The Paris Review, 26, Volt, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Nebraska with his wife and daughter and is on the faculty of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His new collection of poems, Paradise Gelatin, is forthcoming in 2008.

October 19, 2007
Ryan Murphy and Jason Labbe
Educated at The Landing School of Boat building and Design and Columbia University, Ryan Murphy is the winner of the 2005 Chelsea Magazine Award for Poetry and recipient of a grant from the Fund for Poetry. His poems have appeared in the literary journals 3rd bed, Court Green, Crowd, Chelsea, The Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Hat, The Paris Review, Spinning Jenny and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.

Jason Labbe's work appears or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, CROWD, Court Green, The Hat, Absent, Indiana Review, Barrow Street, AGNI, Kulture Vulture, and the 2008 Outside Voices Anthology of Younger Poets, among other venues. He is a musician and plays drums and percussion with various groups around New England and New York, and he can be heard on new recordings by Weigh Down, Latitude/Longitude, and MT Bearington. Jason Labbe lives in New Haven. Visit him at www.studyinblue.com.

September 21, 2007
Alison D. Moncrief
Alison D. Moncrief has a Master's degree in English Literature from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and is currently in the final year of an MFA program for poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared in Images, Soul Fountain, Caduceus, and The Connecticut River Review. She has taught at the Foote School in New Haven and currently teaches in the EWP program at NYU. She lives in East Rock with her husband Andy Bromage and with two cats in the yard.

August 17, 2007
Sarah Pemberton Strong
Sarah Pemberton Strong's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Cream City Review, Atlanta Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. She is also the author of a novel, Burning the Sea (Alyson, 2002). She lives in New Haven, where, in addition to working on new poems and her second novel, she runs a one-woman plumbing company. She also teaches poetry workshops at ALL.

July 20, 2007
John Jeffrey
John Jeffrey received a double major in writing and literature from Western CT State University, where he also edited the college literary magazine for three years. His poetry and fiction has won or placed in competitions in such magazines as Writer's Journal, Byline, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and he has publishing credits in Conatus, Fairfield Review, and the upcoming Connecticut River Review. He has featured at venues throughout the state, as well as on the WHUS Radio Reading show. He is a former host of the Wednesday Night Poetry Series and currently edits the CT Poet Newsletter.

JUNE 21, 2007
Susan Briante
Susan Briante's first collection of poetry, Pioneers in the Study of Motion, was recently published by Ahsahta Press. Poet CD Wright describes the book as "a work of shuddering velocity... an ode, a screed, a lament, a love song of 'pristine and inarticulate mornings.'" Briante's work as a poet, translator and essayist can be found in journals such as Damn the Caesars, Fascicle, TriQuarterly and The Believer. A co-editor of the journal Superflux, Briante is an assistant professor of aesthetic studies at the University of Texas in Dallas.

May 18, 2007
Sherry Brennan & Laura Cronk
Sherry Brennan is a poet and essayist. Her book of poetry On Poems was published in 2004. A translation of Jean-Michel Espitallier's Butcher Fantasy was also published that year. Essays can be found on the web and in various academic journals. She is currently working on a long poem titled "North American Tryptich."

Laura Cronk has published poems in Conduit, LIT, Lyric, McSweeney's, No Tell Motel, and other literary journals. Her work has been anthologized in The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel and Best American Poetry 2006. She has taught poetry in the New York City Public Schools and with the PEN Prison Writing Program.

APRIL 20, 2007
Shin Yu Pai & Rick Benjamin
SHIN YU PAI is the author of The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), 2005), Equivalence, (La Alameda, 2003), and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books, 1998). Three titles, Sightings: Selected Writings 2000-2005 (1913 Press), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks) and Nutritional Feed (Tupelo Press) are forthcoming. Her poems are anthologized in America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press) and The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (Wisdom Publications).

RICK BENJAMIN is a poet and teacher who lives in Providence, Rhode Island. He teaches poetry and community practice at Brown University and RISD & also works in the non-profit sector at the Rhode Island Service Alliance. His poems have appeared in Watershed, Blackletter, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Patterson Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review and Creature Comforts, among other places. He is also the father of eleven year-old twin sons and a ten year old daughter, who consistently creep into his poetry.

FEBRUARY 16, 2007
Brian Clements
Brian Clements is the author of Essays Against Ruin, a book of poems from Texas Review Press, and of And How to End It, a book of prose poems forthcoming from Quale Press. He edits the small press Firewheel Editions and Firewheel's flagship publication, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics. He lives in Newtown and coordinates the MFA in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

JANUARY 19, 2007
Claire Zoghb lives in New Haven, Connecticut, where she works as a freelance graphic artist and book designer. She graduated magna cum laude from Southern Connecticut State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in Graphic Design and holds a Master of Arts in Liberal Studies [Humanities] from Wesleyan University. In April, 1999, she earned a certificate through intensive training at the Amherst Writers and Artists Institute. Her work has appeared in Namasté, The Vermont Literary Review, Peregrine, Potato Eyes, Yankee, High Tide, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, Connecticut Review, Bardsong, CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Saranac Review, MIZNA, in an anthology on children and war, Through A Child’s Eyes [Plain View Press, 2001] and at www.poetsagainstthewar.org. She has poems forthcoming in The Depot Anthology. She currently conducts poetry, bookmaking, and creative writing workshops as a faculty member in the Tabor Community Arts Center’s After School Arts program in Branford, Connecticut, and was Poet-in-Residence at North Branford High School in 2002 and 2004.

DECEMBER 15, 2006
An entire evening of open microphone readings. Bring a poem or two to share with the audience. We will also be collecting nonperishable food items to donate to Loaves & Fishes, a Saturday morning emergency food pantry located at the Episcopal Church of St. Paul & St. James in downtown New Haven.

NOVEMBER 17, 2006
Peter Cole has published two collections of poetry, Rift and Hymns & Qualms. What Is Doubled: Poems 1981-1998 was recently published in Great Britain. Cole has published many volumes of translations from medieval and modern Hebrew and Arabic, most recently, So What: New & Selected Poems, 1971-2005, by Taha Muhammad Ali (Copper Canyon Press). The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 is forthcoming from Princeton University Press's Lockert Library of Translation series. Cole has received numerous awards for his work, including a TLS Translation Prize for Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn Gabirol and the MLA Translation Prize for Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid (both Princeton), as well as fellowships from the NEH, the NEA, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Winner of the 2004 PEN-America Translation Award, for J.Accuse, by Aharon Shabtai (New Directions), he lives in Jerusalem, where he co-edits Ibis Editions, a small-press dedicated to the publication of Levant-related literature. He is currently a Franke Fellow at Yale's Whitney Institute of the Humanities.

OCTOBER 2006
Michelle Noteboom's first book, Edging, received the Heartland Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Verse, Sentence, and The Columbia Poetry Review. She has lived in Paris since 1991 where she writes and earns her living as a translater working mainly in the French audiovisual field. She co-curates the Ivy Writers Reading Series with Jennifer K. Dick, and also translates French poetry.

Juliet Patterson's first book, The Truant Lover, was selected by Jean Valentine as the 2004 winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was recently published by Nightboat Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Bellingham Review, Bloom, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Hayden's Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, The Journal, Washington Square, Verse and other magazines. She teaches poetry and creative writing in Minneapolis and edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review with Rachel Moritz.

SEPTEMBER 2006
Kate Greenstreet's first book, case sensitive, is just out from Ahsahta Press. Her chapbook, Learning the Language, was published by Etherdome Press in 2005. Visit her online at www.kickingwind.com.

Adam Clay is the author of The Wash (Parlor Press 2006) and Canoe (Horse Less Press 2006). Recent poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Barrow Street, CutBank, Iowa Review, Literary Review, and elsewhere. He now lives in Kalamazoo, MI where he is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and a co-editor of Typo Magazine.

AUGUST 18, 2006
Charles Rafferty has published four full-length collections of poetry - The Man on the Tower (University of Arkansas Press, 1995), Where the Glories of April Lead (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001), During the Beauty Shortage (M2 Press, 2005), and A Less Fabulous Infinity (Louisiana Literature Press, 2006). His poems have appeared widely, including American Poetry: The Next Generation, an anthology from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, an anthology from the University of Evansville Press. He has received a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He lives with his wife and daughters in Connecticut.

JULY 21, 2006
Lisa Jarnot is the author of three full-length collections of poetry including Some Other Kind of Mission, Ring of Fire, and Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, Chicago). She recently completed a biography of the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan which will be published by University of California Press in the fall of 2007. She lives in New York City and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Brooklyn College.

JUNE 16, 2006
Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and critic at work on finishing three books: From Dame Quickly (poems), Locomotrix: Selected Poems of Amelia Rosselli (translations from the Italian), and Venice and the Digressive Invention of the Modern (a study of obsolescence and futurity in the post-Romantic epoch). Her poetry appears in Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), War & Peace, Volume 2 (O Books, 2005), The Best American Poetry 2004 (Scribner, 2004), and Enough (O Books, 2003). New writing is forthcoming in Viz, The Drunken Boat, Bombay Gin, The Brooklyn Rail, the Zoland Poetry annual, the 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets, and Jacket. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan's Center for the Humanities, and will join the faculty of English at the University of Chicago this fall.

MAY 19, 2006
John Basinger: A Professor Emeritus of Theater and Sign Language at Three Rivers Community College, John Basinger's credits include a long-time involvement with the National Theatre of the Deaf, with which he has performed as actor and musician on several national and international tours, as well as on Broadway. He had a featured role in Paramount Pictures' Children of a Lesser God, and has performed with the Long Wharf Theater, Hartford Stage Company, and the Manhattan Theater Club. John has been a Mellon Fellow in Theater at Yale University, is a nationally recognized storyteller, and is an active participant in the Poetry Slam movement, coaching a number of Slam Poets. He is the author of Benedict Arnold: A Brave Revenge, which had its inaugural production in Washington Park in Groton, Connecticut, in July of 2003.

John Basinger started committing all twelve books of John Milton's "Paradise Lost" to memory in 1993. Since then, he has been performing them at a variety of venues across the country, including Poetry Alive in Asheville, North Carolina, Bluffton College, Wesleyan University, Yale University, Connecticut College, Southern Connecticut State University, Central Connecticut State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Avol's Bookstore in Madison WI, the University of Redlands, Warren Wilson College, Manhattanville College. He has also performed at the Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., New London (CT) High School, and numerous living rooms, churches and theaters. In Middletown, CT, he has performed regularly at The Buttonwood Tree, Oddfellows Playhouse, the South Congregational Church, and Wesleyan University. He completed the memorization project with Book Twelve in 2001. The project culminated in a 3-day one-man performance of all twelve books at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, Connecticut. Come prepared to be extraordinarily entertained, amused, cajoled, inspired, and to fall in love.

APRIL 21, 2006
Jason Zuzga is the 2005-2006 James Merrill Writer-in-Residence and was a recipient of a 2001-2002 Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. He received an MFA in poetry and nonfiction from the University of Arizona in 2005, and this fall he will begin as a candidate in the PhD program in English Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in FENCE, LIT, VOLT, jubilat, Tin House, and Forklift, Ohio

Jean-Paul Pecqueur's poetry and criticism have appeared broadly in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Arts and Letters, Rain Taxi, River City, Quarterly West, and ZYZZYVA. He is a graduate of the University of Washington's creative writing program where he was the winner of the Academy of American Poets Harold Taylor Prize. His first book, The Case Against Happiness, was the 2005 winner of Alice James Press' New York/New England Prize and will be released in the fall of 2006. Jean-Paul currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at York College and the Pratt Institute.

MARCH 17, 2006
Margot Schilpp's books of poems are The World's Last Night (2001) and Laws of My Nature (2005), both published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The Southern Review, Chelsea, Hotel Amerika, LIT, Denver Quarterly, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at the University of Utah, where she was the Editor of the literary magazine Quarterly West for several years. She now serves as an editor for Tupelo Press. She lives in New Haven with her husband, Jeff, and their daughter, Paula.
 
Jeff Mock is the author of a chapbook, Evening Travelers (Volans Press, 1994), and a guidebook for beginning writers, You Can Write Poetry (Writer's Digest Books, 1998).  His poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The North American Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.  He teaches at Southern Connecticut State University.

FEBRUARY 17, 2006
Kari Edwards is a poet, artist and gender activist, received  one of Small Press Traffic's books of the year (2004), New Langton Art's Bay Area Award in literature (2002); and is author of obedience, Factory School (2005); iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p. , subpress collective (2002), a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002), and post/(pink) Scarlet Press (2000). Edwards' work can also be found in Scribner's The Best American Poetry (2004), Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action, Coffee House Press, (2004), Biting the Error: writers explore narrative, Coach House, Toronto, (2004), Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others, Hawoth Press, Inc. (2004), Experimental Theology, Public Text 0.2., Seattle Research Institute (2003), Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, Painted Leaf Press (2000), Aufgabe, Tinfish, Mirage/Period(ical), Van Gogh's Ear, Amerikan Hotel, Boog City, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, Narrativity, Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, Pom2, Shearsman, and Submodern Fiction.

JANUARY 19, 2006
Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of several chapbooks, most recently, Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver for the 2004 Aldrich Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Margie, 88, Poet Lore , Mot Juste, and in many other publications. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and their three children.

DECEMBER 16, 2005
Suzanne Heyd

Mark Stricker

NOVEMBER 18, 2005
Alice-Anne Harwood

Judy Nacca

OCTOBER 21, 2005
Peter Ganick ran Potes & Poets Press, an influence in the introduction of Language poetry, from 1980-2000. He has published 17 books, including Rectangular Morning Poem, no soap radio, < a ' s a t t v >, and, most recently, tarsals. He lives with his wife in West Hartford Connecticut, and two Welsh Corgis.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2005
Word of Mouth welcomes two poets of Phylum Press

Cathy Eisenhower grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, and now works as a librarian in Washington, D.C. She has published a chapbook of poems, Language of the Dog-heads, with Phylum Press, and her first full-length collection is forthcoming from Edge Books.

Anna Moschovakis is a Brooklyn-based poet and translator. She has published translations of Henri Michaux, Claude Cahun, Blaise Cendrars, Theophile Gautier and Elie Faure. Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Art New England, BOMB magazine, The Iowa Review, The Poker, and Court Green and was included in the anthology 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11th (NYU Press). A pamphlet version of her serial poem The Blue Book was released in 2005 by Phylum Press, and her first full-length book of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, is forthcoming in 2006. A Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, she currently teaches Great Books and Modern Poetry at Queens College. She is also an editor, designer and letterpress printer at Ugly Duckling Presse, a nonprofit art and publishing collective.

Phylum Press is an independent publisher of innovative writing. Beginning in 2001, Phylum has published chapbooks, pamphlets, and collaborations by such writers as Peter Gizzi, Lynie Browne, Roberto Tejada, Kristin Prevallet, Graham Foust, Lorraine Graham, Susan Briante, Charles North, and others, working with artists including Trevor Winkfield, Ariel Potter, Lara Odell, and David Byrne. Reviews of Phylum publications have appeared in The Washington Review, Chicago Review, Shearsman, and Arthur. in 2003, Coracle Press published as part of their Little Critic series The Phylum Press Selection, an anthology of poems representing Phylum's first three years. The website is www.phylumpress.com.

AUGUST 19, 2005
Kim Bridgford directs the writing program at Fairfield University, where she is a professor of English and editor of Dogwood. Her poetry has appeared in The North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Iowa Review, and her fiction in Redbook, The Massachusetts Review, and Witness. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Her first book of poetry, Undone (David Robert Books, 2003), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and her second book of poetry, Instead of Maps (David Robert Books, 2005), was recently published.

JULY 15, 2005
Brian Johnson is the author of Self-Portrait (Quale Press, 2000). His poems have appeared in American Letters and Commentary, North Dakota Quarterly, Connecticut Review, Cinematograph, West Branch and many other journals. His awards include a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Fellowship and an Academy of American Poets Prize. A graduate of UC-Berkeley, he has worked as a waiter, an encyclopedia salesman, a tennis instructor, and the manager of a small film company. He is currently an associate professor at Southern Connecticut State University, where he teaches composition and creative writing.

JUNE 17, 2005
Jari Chevalier's poems have appeared in Poughshares, Cimarron Review, American Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Pivot, Solo, Barrow Street and many other literary journals. She has given invitational readings of her work at colleges, bookstores, coffeehouses and festivals since 1988 and has won numberous awards for her writing. After graduating cum laude in literature and writing from Columbia University, she met her mentor William Matthews at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and studied with him intensively at the Writer's Voice and at City College in New York, where she earned a Master's degree in creative writing and an Academy of American Poets prize. She served as a contributing editor to the poetry journal Barrow Street from 1999 to 2003.

MAY 20, 2005
ALL is pleased to welcome three poet/translators from France:

Oscarine Bosquet is the author of Chromo (Fourbis, 1996). Her poem series "By Day" is forthcoming as a chapbook with Duration Press in May 2005. Extracts of the poem, translated by Omar Berrada and Sarah Riggs, are published in this year's The Poetry Project Newsletter #203 and Chain #12. The original French version of "Par Jour" appeared in the journal If in 1998. Bosquet's work has previously appeared in English translation in Raddle Moon 16, translated by Michael Palmer. Oscarine Bosquet completed the co-translations at the Royaumont Abbey of Benjamin Hollander, and participated in translations of Michael Palmer. Born in 1964 in Paris, Bosquet has lived in recent years on the island of Groix in Brittany with her daughter. She currently teaches in Brest.

Sarah Riggs was born in New York in 1971, and has lived in Paris since 2001. She is the author of Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, & O'Hara (Routledge,2002). Her poetry appears in American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, Chain, Conjunctions, New American Writing, Petite, and 1913: A Journal of Forms. She is part of Double Change, a bilingual poetry association in Paris that organizes a reading series and a web journal. Her translations include Isabelle Garron's Face before against (Seeing Eye Books, 2005) and, with Omar Berrada, Marie Borel's Fox Trump (Issue 4, www.doublechange.com) and Oscarine Bosquet's By Day (Duration Press â05).

After growing up in Casablanca, Omar Berrada has been living in Paris for about 10 years. He has translated works by Joan Retallack, Jennifer Moxley, Avital Ronell, Rod Mengham, Mark Ford into French and, with Sarah Riggs, works by Marie Borel and Oscarine Bosquet into English. He is a member of Double Change, a French and American association devoted to poetry and translation www.doublechange.com. He hosts and produces the radio program La nuit la poesie on France Culture and is a contributing editor of Les Lettres francaises.

APRIL 15, 2005
Tim Parrish is the author of Red Stick Men (U Press of Mississippi), a collection of stories set in his home town of Baton Rouge. He is the recipient of the Gerald A. Freund Grant-in-Aid from the Whiting Foundation and a former Connecticut Arts and Sewanee Writers' Conference fellow. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and for Best New American Voices by Tim O'Brien. His short fiction is forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Cincinnati Review, and War, Literature and the Arts. He has just completed a novel entitled The Jumper. He coordinates the creative writing program at Southern Connecticut State University.

MARCH 18, 2005
Tina Chang, the author of Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004), received an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, Indiana Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Sonora Review, among others. Her poems have been anthologized in Identity Lessons (Penguin Putnum, 1999) Poetry Nation (Vehicule Press, 1998), Asian American Literature (McGraw-Hill, 2001), Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and forthcoming in Poetry 30: Poets in Their Thirties. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Poets & Writers, the Van Lier Foundation and has held writing fellowships from Fundacisn Valparamso, The MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Villa Montalvo. www.tinachang.com

Jason Schneiderman received Bachelors degrees in English and Russian from the University of Maryland, and an MFA in poetry from NYU. He is currently a Chancellors’ Fellow at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He teaches Creative Writing at Hofstra University. His poetry has appeared in Columbia, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Tin House, Rattapallax, Grand Street, StoryQuarterly and many other journals. His translations have appeared in Verse and Modern Poetry in Translation. His essays have appeared in Teachers & Writers and Frigate. He is a senior editor at Painted Bride Quarterly and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He has been both waiter and head-waiter at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont. He is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Writer Magazine/ Emily Dickinson Award. Sublimation Point (Four Way Books) is his first collection of poems.

FEBRUARY 18, 2005
Jeff Davis has published essays and poetry widely and has taught courses & workshops on creative writing and/or yoga at numerous universities, yoga and spiritual centers, and at writing centers. Barnburner Press published his poetry collection City Reservoir in 1998. Penguin Putnam/Gotham Books published in June 2004 The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga as Muse for Authentic Writing. Jeff has taught creative writing at places such as Southern Methodist University's Talented and Gifted Institute, Richland College, Yavneh Academy, Highland Park High School, Beyond Baroque, The Dallas Museum of Art, Arts & Letters Live, WordSpace, and The Writer's Garret.

Cellist Stephanie Winters can be heard around the U.S. playing at clubs, theatres, and major festivals. In 2004 she and Walter Parks opened for Richie Havens. Her recent solo recording is entitled Through the Storm, which features Winters as a multi-tracked one-woman orchestra who tackles a dazzling array of styles from Miles Davis to Bartok, from the Bulgarian Women’s Choir to traditional gospel, as well as her own compositions.

JANUARY 21, 2005
Richard Deming is a poet and critic whose poems have appeared in Field, Sulfur, Mirage Period(ical) #4, Quarter After Eight, Indiana Review, Word for Word and other magazines, as well as in the anthology Great American Prose Poems. He is the author of Somewhere Hereabouts, published in the A.bacus series by Potes and Poets Press.

Daniel Bouchard lives in Somerville, Massachusetts where he edits The Poker www.durationpress.com/thepoker. His second book, Some Mountains Removed (2005), is just out from Subpress, which also published his first book, Diminutive Revolutions.

DECEMBER 17, 2004
Anna Cypra Oliver is the author of Assembling My Father, (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), the riveting account of her search for the truth about her father—a failed architect and child of the counterculture—who ended his life at the age of thirty-five. In 1974, when Anna was five years old, her father put a gun to his head and killed himself. That shot has haunted her all her life. Obsessed with the need to learn who he was and why he died, she set out on a journey of discovery, following the clues he had scattered during his brief lifetime.

NOVEMBER 19, 2004
Delores Hayden's new poetry collection, American Yard, is just out. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Slate, Margin and many other journals and anthologies. She recently won the Boyle Farber award from the New England Poetry Club; she has also won the Poetry Society of America's The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, she is the authoer of several award-winning books about American urban landscapes. Her most recent book, A Field Guide to Sprawl (W. W. Norton, 2004), a "devil's dictionary" of bad building patterns, was featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal. Recently she has appeared on Poetry Connecticut, as well as CNN, The Diane Rehm Show and The Connection. She is a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale.

Laura Hayden Marris is a junior at the Hopkins School. She has been selected by the Hill-Stead Museum as a winner in their Young Poets Competition for Connecticut high school poets. She has read her poetry at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival run by the museum, as well as at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, the Kent Memorial Library, the Farmington Valley Arts Center, and on NPR. Her work is included in the Fresh Voices chapbook published by the museum in 2003.

OCTOBER 15, 2004
Jennifer K. Dick lives in Paris. Her book of poems, Fluorescence, recently won the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Prize. In her poems, very real places--Paris, Massachusetts, Colorado, Iowa, Morocco--mix into the imagined, into Breughelian villages where there's "a persimmon in the corner knitting." These places are inhabited by varied but always very real bodies, stretching outward from their own edges and encountering, or engendering, a certain luminescence in the process. What happens when we exceed ourselves? When fragments of dream are lifted to the surface and through to something beyond? Clues, keys, indications--all that once seemed certain slips off into code. These poems use language to crack it.

Julie Carr lives in Oakland California with her husband and two children. She is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. Her poems have been recently published in American Letters and Commentary, 3rd Bed, Seneca Review, POOL, LIT, The Canary, Xantippe, and on line at Tarpaulin Sky. Her book, MEAD: An Epithalamion won (along with Jennifer Dick's Fluorescence) the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Prize. She is also a recipient of a Grolier Poetry Prize and an Eisner Award for poetry.

SEPTEMBER 17, 2004
A teacher and a poet, David Cappella is a member of the English department at Central Connecticut State University. He is the co-author with Baron Wormser of Teaching the Art of Poetry: The Moves (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2000) and of A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day to Day (Heinemann, 2004). He was the resident teacher at The Frost Place Teacher Seminar in 2003. He has presented workshops on teaching poetry throughout the United States. His poems have appeared The Connecticut Review, Diner, The Newbury Review and other journals.

Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the online journal of the arts, http://www.drunkenboat.com. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Word Press in May 2004. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets &Writers, Time Out New York, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, The Indiana Review, Western Humanities Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer's Chronicle, among other publications. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, has served on panels at UCLA, Poet's House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore, been a commentator for NPR and Wesleyan radio, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an interview with him at: http://jacketmagazine.com/16/dev-iv-shank.html. He does not play the sitar.

AUGUST 20, 2004
Nancy Kuhl’s chapbook, In the Arbor, was winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Phoebe, The Connecticut Review, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, The Journal, and other magazines. Her manuscript, The Wife of the Left Hand, was a finalist for this year’s National Poetry Series book contest and is currently a finalist for the Verse Prize from Verse Press and the Tupelo Press First Book Award. She is co-editor of Phylum Press, an independent publisher of innovative poetry. She is the Assistant Curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

JULY 16, 2004
Amy Holman lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has been selected for The Best American Poetry 1999 and nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and both poetry and fiction is published in print and online journals including CrossConnect, American Letters & Commentary, Failbetter, Night Train, Shade, Rattapallax, Poet Lore, Van Gogh's Ear and Literal Latte. A frequent reader at series from New York to Paris, Amy has also taught at NYU, Emerson College, Walloon Lake Writers Conference, the Western Montana Writers Workshop and the People's Poetry Gathering, among others. Amy has enjoyed recurring guest teaching status at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and New York University Graduate Creative Writing Program. She is a contributor to the forthcoming writing guides, Making the Perfect Pitch, The Writer Books, 2004, and The Practical Writer, Penguin, 2004, and "The Artist's Toolbox" in the National Endowment for the Arts web site. She is the associate editor of Get Your First Book Published, Career Press, 2000, and its earlier edition, First Book Market, MacMillan, 1998.

JUNE 26, 2004 SPECIAL EVENT
Tony Gloeggler and Angelo Verga: A reading straight from the pages of Jane Street Press of New York City.

JUNE 18, 2004
Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Red Paper Flower (Little Poem Press, 2004) Exhale (2000) and The Tactile Sense (1996). In addition, her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Mangrove, The Wisconsin Review, JAMA, Paterson Literary Review, Pif Magazine, Web del Sol 's In Posse Review, and La Petite Zine, The Pedestal Magzine and Exquisite Corpse. She was a finalist for the 2001 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and is associate editor of Samsara Quarterly.

MAY 21, 2004
Cameron K. Gearen has published a chapbook of poetry entitled Night, Relative ot Day and selected by Robert Pinsky (2004). Her poetry has appeared in Fence, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Poetry Northwest, The Bellingham Review, River Styx, Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review and elsewhere. She won the Grolier Prize in 1994, the W.B. Yeats Society Poetry Contest in 2001 (judged by Paul Muldoon), and placed third in the 1997 Painted Bride Quarterly Poetry Contest (judged by Mark Doty). In 2001, her manuscript was selected as a finalist for the Walt Whitman Prize, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. She has given readings in several venues, including the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and In the First Place, a quarterly salon. She holds an MFA in poetry writing from Indiana University. She resides in New Haven, where she teaches poetry at the Educational Center for the Arts.

APRIL 24, 2004 SPECIAL EVENT
Douglas Goetsch is the author of The Job of Being Everybody, Nobody’s Hell and three award-winning chapbooks. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, Third Coast, and online at PoetryDaily. He runs a creative writing program for incarcerated teens at Passages Academy in New York City, teaches writing in programs across the country, and is founding editor of Jane Street Press.

APRIL 16, 2004
Faith Vicinanza is a published poet, visiting artist, editor, publisher,workshop facilitator, and event manager. She is a Master Teaching Artist in Poetry for the CT Commission on the Arts; on the editorial staff of several national literary magazines; the founder and Executive Director of The CT Poetry Festival (1997, 2001, and 2003); and founder/executive director of Hanover Press.  Ms. Vicinanza is founder and executive director of PoetTs, Inc., a not-for-profit collective of poets and teachers that develop and facilitate visiting artists' programs for young writers. She develops and delivers creative writing and self-expression workshops for writers' retreats, conferences, and festivals; as well as stage performances; and is co-founder of Creative Beginnings -- a partnership offering workshops to support the creative writing process. She has worked with numerous schools, arts organizations and libraries, and she founded or co-founded many writers' support groups and poetry programs across Connecticut, including the Wednesday Night Poetry Series initiated in 1994 -- the longest running weekly poetry reading and open mike series in the state featuring new voices and accomplished poets from around the world.  Her work is widely published and received two Pushcart nominations in 2003.  Ms. Vicinanza was one of 16 poets to be nominated for the position of Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut in 2001, and is the recipient of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Distinguished Advocates for the Arts Award (March, 2003).

APRIL 7, 2004 SPECIAL EVENT WITH MUSICIAN KIM HOFFMAN
James Navé is one of the pioneers of the performance poetry movement in America, as well as co-founder of Poetry Alive!. He is an active member of the Poetry Slam community, and brings more than 20 years of experience to the craft of presenting poetry on stage. For the past ten years he has co-taught with Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. A native of Western North Carolina, he splits his time between Asheville, NC and Taos, NM.

MARCH 19, 2004
Sharon Charde, a psychotherapist in Lakeville, CT, is an award-winning poet published in the Connecticut River Review, Calyx, the Homestead Review, Poeticas and two anthologies, in addition to editing the anthology of poetry by the young women of Touchstone, I Am Not A Juvenile Delinquent.

FEBRUARY 20, 2004
Sandra Bishop Ebner works as a psychiatric case manager for a Visiting Nurse Service. She teaches poetry to 7th graders under a grant-funded program. She has been published in various literary journals, including therecently published anthology, Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses. Her book of poems, The Space Between, was published by Hanover Press in 2000.

JANUARY 16, 2004
Mistryel (Mar) Walker: This indecisive Connecticut native says she likes to tinker with differing forms of expression: poetry, music, visual art and acting. She has been a participant in the Wednesday Night Poetry Series open mic since 1994, and will be represented in its Depot Anthology when it comes out later this year. Her poems have been published in The Underwood Review, Poeticas, X-Magazine and The Natural Networker. Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding is the title of her chapbook which she self-published in 1998. Some samples of her work can be found at her website "The Metaphoratorium" at www.mistryel.com. Walker has performed in plays at the Warner Theater and the Sherman Playhouse, for a Bethel Library Benefit Dinner Theater Show and at the former CT Conservatory of the Performing Arts in New Milford. She was a semi-finalist for the Frederik Schorr Memorial Prize in voice in 2003.