Lynne Schmidt’s manuscript, The Unaccounted for Circles of Hell, was a finalist for the 2020 New Women’s Voices Award from Finishing Line Press, while her manuscript, Dead Dog Poems, a collection about the grief that comes with a terminal cancer diagnosis of a beloved emotional support animal, won the prize.
About Lynne
Lynne Schmidt is the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and a mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the author of the chapbooks, Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press) which was listed as one of the 17 Best Breakup Books to Read in 2020, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West), which was featured on The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. Her work has received the Maine Nonfiction Award, Editor’s Choice Award, and was a 2018 and 2019 PNWA finalist for memoir and poetry respectively. Lynne was a five time 2019 and 2020 Best of the Net Nominee, an honorable mention for the Charles Bukowski, and Doug Draime Poetry Awards. In 2012 she started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.
When the pandemic hit in March, Gregory Joseph Firlotte decided it was time to sort through a lifetime of poetry he had written for his own reading and publish a book about his beloved New England. The aptly-named In This New England features poems in rhyme and free verse about the people, places, events and iconic foods of the region. A native of Gardiner, Maine — home to one of his poetic heroes Edwin Arlington Robinson — Firlotte grew up surrounded by history at almost every turn (he’s a descendant of two Mayflowerpassengers on his mother’s side) and thus had lots of memories and experiences throughout New England to draw upon. Though now living in Los Angeles, Firlotte has traveled to New England off and on over the years, staying in touch with his roots and finding more poetic inspiration along the way. “The book has come out at a time when many people cannot travel here. So, I hope my poems provide a few moments of pure escape and bring back some memories as well,” notes Firlotte. In the book, one will find poems about such places as Boston, Salem, Franconia Notch, Vermont’s Craftsbury Common, the Longfellow Statue in Portland and there are also photos taken by Firlotte and his brother sprinkled throughout which provide a visual connection for those not familiar with the region, its landmarks, place names or foods.
“If my book can generate interest in New England in any way, then it has been successful,” he remarks. “There is so much to explore and savor within these six states that one can spend a lifetime enjoying and never tire of it — even if it’s only the scenic beauty and distinctive foods that have defined New England over the centuries.” The 180-page softcover book was released September 21 on Amazon and is being followed up by another book, also with the theme of New England, scheduled for early Spring 2021.
About the Author Gregory Joseph Firlotte grew up in Gardiner, Maine in a very creative household — his mother was a poet and writer and his father an artist and musician. At high school graduation in 1971, he received First Prize for his essay on freedom; and later in 1981, his interview with famed, but then-reclusive, Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith was published in the Maine Sunday Telegram and he has been writing publicly ever since. Over the years, his feature stories and photography on art, interior design and architecture have appeared worldwide in such publications as Architectural Digest, The Los Angeles Times, World of Interior Magazine, Veranda Magazine and LA Design Magazine to name a few. In This New England is the first time his poetry has been presented to the public
Owen Lewis receives national recognition through the NEW YORK CITY BIG BOOK AWARD®!
The NYC BIG BOOK AWARD recognized Field Lightin the category of poetry as a DistinguishedFavorite.
The competition is judged by experts from different aspects of the book industry, including publishers, writers, editors, book cover designers and professional copywriters. Selected award winners and distinguished favorites are based on overall excellence.
Field Light (Dos Madres Press) is a book of and about the Berkshires in western Massachusetts. Written as a unified work, with some sections is prose and dramatic formats, it encompasses the social, cultural, and political histories of an area known for its artists and social justice. The voices of W.E.B. Du Bois, Elizabeth Mumbet (first slave freed in Massachusetts in 1781), Daniel Chester French (sculptor of the Lincoln memorial), Norman Rockwell and his last political paintings, Hawthorne, Melville, and nearby writers such as Stanley Kunitz and Chris Gilbert form parts of this collage-like work that asks how we can know can know and enter history, how the self expands when personal and public history meet.
Julie Danho’s first full-length collection, Those Who Keep Arriving, won the 2018 Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press and was published on September 15, 2020. Poems from the book have appeared in journals such as Pleiades, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, and New Ohio Review as well as featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her chapbook, Six Portraits, received the 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Award, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and the MacColl Johnson Fund. Julie has an M.F.A. from Ohio State University and works as an editor in Providence, Rhode Island.
“In Julie Danho’s Those Who Keep Arriving, the personal is political and the political is terrifying. Danho faces this terror and transcends it to make stunning poems about creating a home and family. She often employs the ekphrasis mode, seeing well-known visual pieces anew, using them as vehicles for exploration. She also writes her own character studies in American Landscape and other forms. In “Abstraction,” a sonogram is imagined as art on a wall called “Moon, Clouds, / Volcano Taken From Above.” The glittering surfaces of her elegant poems are as fascinating as their substance.”
—Denise Duhamel
“A first full-length collection in name only, this is mature, polished work that consistently moves past the anticipated ending and discovers, in that excavated place or moment, where the significant truth so often lies. From the small pleasures of donut pajamas and pink bathrooms to the anxieties of “It’s Terrible What’s Happening There” and “When the First Father Dies,” Julie Danho shows range and depth. It’s been a pleasure to be among the first to read these moving poems.”
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Samantha Kolber 802-477-3131 kolbersam@gmail.com
Announcing the Publication of Montpelier Poet’s Debut
“Birth of a Daughter” by Samantha Kolber is available now
MONTPELIER, Vt. — Samantha Kolber is an award-winning poet who edits the poetry series at Rootstock Publishing. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she also coordinates events and marketing for Bear Pond Books, and is the mother to an 18-year-old son and four-year-old daughter. “Birth of a Daughter,” a poetry chapbook [small book] published by independent publisher Kelsay Books in Utah, is Kolber’s debut.
“Birth of a Daughter is an honest and vivid portrait of new motherhood. It is a chapbook about intimacy and love, both for the child and for the self. ‘There is a world at my fingertips. / Or, I am the world — fingertipped’ Kolber writes in her poem ‘A(u)reola.’ These poems are a beautiful witness to that common, yet utterly profound occurrence of birth,” says Bianca Stone, author of The Mobius Strip Club of Grief and A Little Called Pauline.
“In Birth of a Daughter, Samantha Kolber deftly reveals the private world of pregnancy and birth—the middle of the night and light of day worries about safety, connection, and intimacy, weighing what shifts, writing, ‘I am marked. I am one becoming two, becoming one / again…my body deceives me.’ Indeed, these poems are brave in their accounting of the pregnant, birthing body and the realities of mothering, the territory we enter—‘oh, these worlds we are now / you and I.’ Dailiness and milestones merge here, bringing us on a journey that is part emotional travelogue, part wonder, part weighing of generations and of our times, and part arrival at the precise awareness that, ‘I am witness. I am mother.’ Kolber’s voice is an important one, honoring what is often kept hidden,” says Kerrin McCadden, author of Keep This to Yourself.
Birth of a Daughter is available to purchase at Bear Pond Books and wherever books are sold (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop) and the publisher’s website, www.kelsaybooks.com.
A virtual book launch reading co-sponsored by Bear Pond Books and the Kellogg-Hubbard Library is scheduled for October 9th.
To request an interview, virtual reading with the author, or a review copy of the book, please contact the author through her website, www.samanthakolber.com.
Release Date: September 1, 2020 / 42 pages / 6×9 / ISBN: 9781952326363 / $16.00 / Poetry Distributed by Ingram and Kelsay Books
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About Samantha Kolber
Samantha Kolber has received a Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a Vermont Poetry Society prize. She has published in many journals and anthologies, including Hunger Mountain, Poems2Go, Mom Egg Review, and PoemCity. She received her MFA from Goddard College and completed post-grad work at Pine Manor College’s Solstice MFA Program. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont, where she coordinates events and marketing for Bear Pond Books and is the Poetry Series Editor for Rootstock Publishing. She volunteers with PoemCity, a program of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library. “Birth of a Daughter” (Kelsay Books, 9/1/20) is Kolber’s first book. Read and listen to her poems at her website, samanthakolber.com.
David McCann has been teaching, writing, translating, and otherwise engaging Korea sijo poetry. He and his wife attended the dedication ceremony last year for the new Sijo Stone Garden in Boryeong Korea. He was invited to send a poem, which has been translated into Korean and turned into yet one more stone in the garden.
Slavic Voices: An Evening of Poetry and Music with Sylva Fischerova, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Vera Pavlova. At BU Center for the Study of Europe. Wednesday, October 15, 2014.
Dzvinia Orlowsky’s poem, “Lullaby,” appears in the current issue of JAMA, (Vol 324, No. 4, pg. 401) https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768810 Copyright 2020 American Medical Association, All rights reserved.
Dzvinia Orlowsky’s co-translated manuscript titled ECCENTRIC DAYS OF HOPE AND SORROW from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivits’s poems, has been accepted for publication by Lost Horse Press and is forthcoming in fall of 2021. Bilotserkivits’s poems, known for lyricism and the quiet power of despair, became hallmarks of Ukraine’s literary life of the 1980s. www.losthorsepress.org
Congratulations to Owen Lewis who has a new book of (mostly) poetry out from Dos Madres Press, entitled: Field Light.
Advance praise: “This is a book vast in social thought, in narrative, and, most of all, in exceptional poetry.”–Kevin Prufer”
A truly epic sweep of poems and prose of immediacy and history in the Berkshires.”–David Giannini
Open air, safe-distanced, book launch/reading in Daniel Chester French’s Chesterwood Studio Garden, Stockbridge, Mass., July 25th, 4:30 pm. To register to attend the reading: www.Chesterwood.org
Ed Meek has had poems recently in Into the Void, South Florida Poetry Journal, The Galway Review, Ekphrasis, High Shelf Press, The Blue Mountain Review, What Rough Beast, Dash, North of Oxford, Journal of Arts and Letters, Gold Walkman Review, The Athena Review, and the Provincetown Poem and a Photo Exhibit.
He has poems coming out in Constellations, Muddy River Poetry Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review, Aurorean, First Literary Review East, Ibbetson, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, The Blue Mountain Review, War, Literature and the Arts, Fragmented Voices Anthology, The North Sea Poetry Anthology. You can find his book reviews in The Arts Fuse and articles in Boomer Café and CounterPunch. His new book, High Tide, can be ordered at Aubadepublishing.com.
