National Poetry Month @ the BPL: Eleanor Kedney, Mary Hills Kuck, James Zimmerman

The NEPC is partnering with the Boston Public Library, Jamaica Plain Branch, for a National Poetry Month kickoff! The reading, on Saturday, April 5 at 3:00 pm, will be free and open to the public. The JP Branch, at 30 South Street, is an accessible venue.

Eleanor Kedney is the author of three books: Twelve Days From Transfer (3: A Taos Press, 2024), Between the Earth and Sky (C&R Press, 2020), and the chapbook The Offering (Liquid Light Press, 2016). Twelve Days From Transfer is a 2024 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards finalist; Between the Earth and Sky was a finalist for the 2021 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards and the American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Awards. Her work has been published in various journals, magazines, and anthologies. Honors for individual poems include the 2019 riverSedge Poetry Prize (University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) and a finalist mention in the 2020 Mslexia Poetry Competition. Kedney founded the Tucson branch of the New York-based Writers Studio and served as the director for ten years. Inspired by craft techniques utilized in her books, Eleanor developed the “Writing Toward Forgiveness” workshop. She joined the Tucson Poetry Festival board in 2021.

Mary Hills Kuck, a born Midwesterner, has spent most of her adult life in the US Northeast and in Jamaica, West Indies. Since retiring from teaching German, English, and ESOL, she has settled in Massachusetts with her husband and family. She has published poems in The Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Poetry Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Amethyst, The Lyric, and a number of other journals. Intermittent Sacraments, her chapbook, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. Her full-length book, Before I Forget, was published by Kelsay Books in 2024, which sponsored it for an Eric Hoffer Award. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

A frequent Pushcart Prize nominee, James K. Zimmerman‘s work appears in Chicago Quarterly Review, december, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, and Reed, among numerous other journals and publications, and is also featured on websites such as The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry, and Vallum. He is the author of Little Miracles (Passager Books), Family Cookout (Comstock) – winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize – and The Further Adventures of Zen Patriarch Dōgen (Poetry Box). Valuing his neurodivergence as an essential wellspring of his creative inspiration, he also cultivates roses, orchids, friends, and paradoxical questions in his spare time. He can be contacted at https://jameskzimmerman.net.