Red Letter Live! – Regie Gibson, Dzvinia Orlowsky, Steven Ratiner, Rick McLaughlin

Arlington Center for the Arts is pleased to be hosting these special Poetry Readings by 3 Red Letter Poets as part of Arlington Open Studios! The event will also feature music by bassist Rick McLaughlin!

Hosted by Steven Ratiner, publisher of The Red Letters and Jean Flanagan, Arlington’s Poet Laureate in the Community Room at Robbins Library (700 Mass Ave Arlington, MA | 1-3pm)

More info available at ACARTS.ORG

Regie Gibson is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin, and the creator of the Shakespeare Time-Traveling Speakeasy — a theatrical, literary-musical performance focusing on the life, works, and influence of William Shakespeare. He has lectured and performed widely in the US, Cuba, and Europe. Among a long list of honors, Regie has received the Walker Scholarship from the Providence Fine Arts Work Center; multiple Mass Cultural Council Awards for poetry; the YMCA Writer’s Fellowship; the Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, and two Live Arts Boston (LAB) grants for the production of his first musical, The Juke: A Blues Bacchae. In Italy, representing the U.S., Regie received both the Absolute Poetry Award (Monfalcone) and the Europa en Versi Award (LaGuardia di Como). He has served as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts’ How Art Works initiative and the Mere Distinction of Colour — a permanent exhibit examining the legacy of slavery and the U.S. Constitution at President James Madison’s home in Montpelier, Virginia. He teaches at Clark University in Worcester and is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books, translator, and author of seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including A Handful of Bees, reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series; Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry; and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest, named to Brilliant Book’s Most Brilliant Books of 2024 list. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky. For her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s and Halyna Kruk’s poetry, they have been short-listed, respectively, for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, ALTA’s National Translation Award in Poetry, and the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation.

Steven Ratiner is the author of GRIEF’S APOSTROPHE, published by Beltway Editions in 2025. He’s also published three poetry chapbooks and a collection of poetry interviews. His work has appeared in scores of journals in America and abroad, including Parnassus, Agni, Hanging Loose, Poet Lore, Salamander, Vox Populi, QRLS (Singapore), and Poetry Australia. He’s also written poetry criticism for The Christian Science Monitor, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. GIVING THEIR WORD – Conversations with Contemporary Poets was reissued in a paperback edition (University of Massachusetts Press). He is Poet Laureate Emeritus for Arlington, Massachusetts, and was elected in 2024 as President of the New England Poetry Club, one of the oldest literary associations in America. His weekly Red Letter Poems features a diverse range of poets, from up-and-coming talents to some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry (stevenratiner.com). Steven will also be reading from Fellow Creatures, a new chapbook of poems by former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, published as a benefit for the Red Letters.

Rick McLaughlin is a bassist, composer, arranger, and producer whose dynamic performances have taken him to stages on four continents. For more than 25 years, he has anchored the Grammy-nominated jazz ensemble Either/Orchestra, appearing in festivals and recordings from Boston to Barcelona and Addis Ababa. McLaughlin has shared the stage with Don Byron, Steve Lacy, Danilo Pérez, John Zorn, Mulatu Astatke, and other musical innovators, earning praise from George Russell as “one of my favorite bassists.” His acclaimed debut album, Study of Light, features a groundbreaking jazz adaptation of Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major. Also an educator, McLaughlin is Professor of Harmony and Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music, where his course on Stevie Wonder led to his guest appearance on The Wonder of Stevie podcast (2024).