February 18, 2020 - Diane Lockward
Annual
Sweetheart Night
Featuring
Diane Lockward Reading Selections from Her Own Works,
along
with Poets Jessica deKoninck, Deborah Gerrish, Tina Kelley,
Susan
Rothbard, David Vincenti, and Michael T. Young
Reading
from Diane’s Anthology A Constellation of
Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019)
Diane Lockward’s publications
include The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement,
What Feeds Us, and Eve’s Red Dress, as well as two
chapbooks. Her poems have been widely published and anthologized. Her awards include a NJ State Arts
Council Poetry Fellowship, the 2006 Quentin R. Howard Poetry Book Prize, First
Place in the 2012 Naugatuck River Review
poetry contest, and a 2013 Woman of Achievement award. Diane has been a
featured poet and presenter at numerous festivals, including the Geraldine R.
Dodge Festival, the Warren County Poetry Festival, and the Massachusetts Poetry
Festival, among others. She was the Founder and Director of Poetry Festival: A
Celebration of Literary Journals, which she ran for twelve years. For the past
fifteen years she has also organized Girl Talk: A Reading in Celebration of
Women’s History Month. Diane is
Poet Laureate of West Caldwell, NJ. In 2015 she founded Terrapin Books, a
small press for poetry books, and serves as its editor and publisher.
March
17, 2020 - John McDermott
Irish
Night (Be sure to wear something green!)
Featuring
John McDermott Reading Selections from His Own Work
and
from the Works of William Butler Yeats
John McDermott, a Cranford
resident, is the 2016 recipient of the Fanwood Arts Council’s Carriage House
Poetry Prize for his poem, “Census 2016,” which took first place among 821
entries. John is a former poetry editor of U.S.
1 Worksheets. He has twice been invited to read his work at the Geraldine
R. Dodge Poetry Festival and serves as a Dodge Poet, working with teachers and
students. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Tiferet, and Frogpond. He
is the author of the poetry collection The
Long Way Home (available in bound print and CD formats). Professor emeritus
of English as a Second Language at Union County College, he has also taught
English as a Second language in Nanjing, China and Osaka, Japan.
April 21, 2020 - Martin Farawell
Martin Jude Farawell’s poems
have appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, and his plays have
been produced in regional, university, off-off-Broadway, and community theaters
from Los Angeles to South Africa. Martin has more than two decades of hands-on
experience in all aspects of theatrical production and has inaugurated poetry
reading series at the Pike Street Arts Center and New York University. He
taught composition, creative writing, poetry and literature for ten years on
the secondary school and college levels, and is an experienced visiting
artist-in-the-schools. He currently directs the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry
Program and Festival. Since 1998, as Festival Assistant, Festival Coordinator,
Associate Director and then Director, Martin has worked behind the scenes on
every phase of planning, designing and producing the Dodge Poetry Festival and
Poetry in the Schools Program. He is the author of two poetry collections, Odd Boy and Genesis: A Sequence of Poems.
May
19, 2020 - Rogan Kelly and Michelle Ortega
The
Art of the Prose Poem
Rogan Kelly is a writer and
educator. His poems have recently been featured or are forthcoming in The Citron Review, Diode, Edison Literary
Review, formercactus, Hobo Camp Review, Mojave River Press & Review, PIVOT,
and Shrew Literary Zine. He was a
finalist for The Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition, and a finalist for the 2018 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize.
He has been a former D.C. speechwriter and special education teacher, and has
also served as Associate Publisher with Serving
House Books. His collection of poems, Demolition in the Tropics, was published
in 2019.
Michelle Ortega, MS, CCC-SLP is a licensed
speech-language pathologist and founding President of Communicare Ltd., Inc. In
her private practice, Michelle uses a holistic approach, combining manual
therapy and sensory integration techniques with traditional speech-language
therapy to support patients of all ages and diagnoses to develop and recover
communication skills. She enjoys travel, especially to Paris and New York City,
and photography. Her writing has been published, or is forthcoming, online and
in print, at Tweetspeak Poetry, Casual (an e-book), Tiferet Journal, Exit 13,
Contemporary Haibun Online, Snapdragon: A Journal of Healing,
and abroad in Horizon: The Haiku
Anthology.
June 23, 2020 - Malachy McCourt
PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS READING WILL TAKE PLACE ON JUNE 23rd, THE 4th TUESDAY IN JUNE, NOT OUR USUAL 3rd TUESDAY. THERE WILL NOT BE A READING ON JUNE 16th, SO BE SURE TO MARK YOUR CALENDARS AND PLAN ON JOINING US ON JUNE 23rd!
Malachy McCourt (born 20
September 1931) is an Irish-American actor, writer and politician. The younger
brother of author Frank McCourt (author of Angela’s
Ashes), he is the last surviving sibling of the seven McCourt children.
Malachy was born in New York but was raised in Limerick, Ireland, and returned
to the United States in 1952. McCourt the author of two memoirs, the
best-selling A Monk Swimming and Singing My Him Song, as well as Harold be Thy Name, a book on the
history of the much-loved Irish ballad “Danny Boy,” and Death Need Not Be Fatal. He has acted on television and in several
movies, including The Molly Maguires, The
Brink’s Job, Q, Brewster’s Millions, The January Man, Beyond the Pale, and Ash Wednesday. He has also appeared on
several soap operas, including Ryan’s
Hope, Search for Tomorrow, All My Children, and One Life to Live. In Addition, Malachy also appeared on stage in
plays such as “DA,” “The Hostage,” “Mass Appeal,” “Inherit the Wind,” and “A
Child’s Christmas in Wales.” On television, he was a semi-regular on The Jack Paar Tonight Show with Jack
Paar and Merv Griffin. Malachy and his brother, Frank McCourt, developed,
staged and acted in “A Couple of Blaguards,” which has been produced throughout
America, Australia and the UK. He is the recipient of IAW&A’s 2016 annual Eugene
O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award.
July
21, 202 - Summer Hiatus
August
18, 2020 - Summer Hiatus
September
15, 2020 - BJ Ward
BJ Ward is the author of Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990-2013,
which received the Paterson Poetry Prize. His other books are Gravedigger’s Birthday, 17 Love Poems with
No Despair, and Landing in New Jersey
with Soft Hands, all published by North Atlantic Books and distributed by
Random House. His poetry has been featured on National Public Radio’s “The
Writer’s Almanac,” NJTV’s “State of the Arts,” as well as in publications such
as Poetry, The American Poetry Review,
The New York Times, TriQuarterly, and The
Sun, among other journals. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize for
Poetry and two Distinguished Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State
Council on the Arts. BJ has also received the Governor’s Award in Arts
Education from the State of New Jersey and has been designated Distinguished
Teaching Artist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He has taught at
The Frost Place, the Controlled Burn Writers’ Seminar, and the New Jersey
Governor’s School of the Arts.
October
20, 2020 - Renée Ashley
Renée Ashley grew up in
California and lives in New Jersey. Her newest book is Minglements: Prose on Poetry and Life. She is the author of seven
volumes of poetry: Ruined Traveler (forthcoming), The View from the Body, Because I Am the
Shore I Want to Be the Sea (Subito Press Book Prize), Basic Heart (X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, Texas Review Press), The Revisionist’s Dream, The Various Reasons of Light, and Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry), as
well as two chapbooks, The Verbs of
Desiring and The Museum of Lost Wings.
She has also published a novel, Someplace
Like This (Permanent Press). A portion of her poem First Book of the Moon is included in a permanent installation by
the artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station Terminal in Manhattan. Renée has received fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts,
as well as a Pushcart Prize. She is on the core faculty of Fairleigh Dickinson
University’s low-residency graduate programs, the MFA in Creative Writing and the
MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators.
November
17, 2020 - Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon is an
internationally acclaimed poet who was born on a farm in County Armagh,
Northern Ireland. He has published over thirty collections and won a Pulitzer
Prize for Poetry, as well as the T. S. Eliot Prize (among other honors and
awards). He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004. At
Princeton University, he is both the Howard G. B. Clark ‘21 Professor in the
Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He has also
served as president of the Poetry Society (UK) and as Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.
Paul has won the following major poetry
awards:
1990: Guggenheim Fellowship
1992: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for Madoc: A Mystery
1994: T. S. Eliot Prize for The Annals of Chile
1997: Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry for New Selected Poems 1968–1994
2002: T. S. Eliot Prize (shortlist) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Griffin Poetry Prize (Canada) for Moy Sand and Gravel
2003: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Moy Sand and Gravel
2004: American Ireland Fund Literary Award
2004: Aspen Prize for Poetry
2004: Shakespeare Prize
2009: John William Corrington Award for Literary
Excellence
2017: Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry
Selected Honors Include:
Honorary Professor in the School of English at
the University of St Andrews (Scotland)
Professor of Poetry at Oxford University
1999–2004 (England)
Honorary Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford
University (England)
Fellowship with the Royal Society of Literature
(England)
Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences (US)
December
16, 2020 - Winter Hiatus
