Poetry at Magazine Beach Park: Peter Payack, Michael Todd Steffen, Jessica Lucci
The NEPC is delighted to return, for a third summer, to Mass Audubon’s Magazine Beach Park Nature Center in Cambridge. This event, the first of two, is free of charge and the venue is accessible. Registration is requested. An open mic will follow the featured poets. Please join us!
Peter Payack was the first Poet Populist of Cambridge, Massachusetts (2007-2009). His innovation, Phone-a-Poem, the Cambridge/Boston Poetry Hotline (1976-2001), along with his work and realia, is archived at Harvard’s Lamont Library.
Payack’s poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Cornell Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, etc. He has published over 1,500 poems, stories, prose poems, and photos. His poem, “The Migration of Darkness”, won the 1980 Rhysling Award. Quirk Books named it the number one poem that unites science and art. His work has been extensively anthologized, including Knowing & Writing, New Perspectives on Classical Questions (Harper Collins), The Paris Review Anthology (Norton), Asimov’s Wonders of the World (Dial), and Envisioning Other Worlds (Cornelsen, Berlin).
Payack is the inventor of The Stonehenge Watch™, a replica of Stonehenge inside an old-fashioned pocket watch case, which can be used as a shadow clock to tell time, mark the seasons, and predict eclipses. The Stonehenge Watch™ premiered at The First International Sky Art Conference at MIT.
As a Sky Artist, Payack has been commissioned to do STAR-POEMS! for The New York Avant Garde Festival, The International Sky Art Conference (Cambridge, MA, Delphi, Greece), The Harvard 350 Celebration, and Boston’s First Night.
Payack was awarded the 2010 Haskall Award for Distinguished Teaching at The University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Michael Todd Steffen lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He helps coordinate The Hastings Room Reading Series, and frequently publishes articles about new and established poets on the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene website. His poems have appeared in journals, including The Boston Globe, The Dark Horse, Everse Radio, The Exacting Clam, North of Oxford, Ibbetson Street and spoKe. Boris Dralyuk (managing editor for Nimrod Journal) writes, “I have read [Steffen’s] poems with enormous satisfaction. His lines are supple and wear their unmistakable wisdom lightly.” Calling his second book, On Earth As It Is, “important work,” Joan Houlihan noted Steffen’s “intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.” Mike’s third collection, I Saw My Life, is just out from Lily Poetry Review Books.
Jessica Lucci is a poet and steampunk author who writes about modern issues while maintaining historic integrity. You can find her poetry collections, How Can I Steal a Purse and Graveyard Shift, at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. Her literacy program, “Watch City Readers,” has been awarded grants for five years in a row from the Mass Cultural Council and Waltham Cultural Council. She loves little adventures, as long as she has a notebook.