NEPC at Westwood: Cindy Ellen Hill, Fred Gerhard, B. Fulton Jennes

The New England Poetry Club is delighted to present a reading by three poets at the Westwood (Mass.) Public Library! The reading will happen on Sunday, January 26, 2025, at 2:00 p.m. The poets will be introduced by Lynne Viti, Westwood Poet Laureate and a member of the NEPC Advisory Board. This event is free and open to the public.

Fred Gerhard’s book, Drifting to “Hello” (Khotso Publishing), arrived in 2023. His chapbook, Lilacs Still Bloom in Ashburnham (Local Gems Poetry Press), came out in 2023, with a second edition from Petronella Press in 2024.  His poems have appeared in Amethyst Review, Entropy Magazine, Friends Journal, Harpy Hybrid Review, Pif Magazine, POETiCA REViEW, and other magazines and anthologies. His poems have been in various galleries, including the Fitchburg Art Museum, and have been voiced by actor Kirk Lawrence-Howard on YouTube. He is one of the 2023 winners of the Poetry in the Pines contest in New Hampshire. And he is the 2024 poetry winner for Art on the Trails in Massachusetts. He is an editor for Quabbin Quills and for Smoky Quartz. And he is one of the founders of the New Dawn Writers’ Group in Ashburnham where he leads monthly poetry workshops and hosts open mic nights.

Cindy Ellen Hill is the author of Mosaic: Poems from Travels in Italy (Wild Dog Press 2024), Elegy for the Trees (Kelsay Books 2022), Wild Earth and Other Sonnets (Antrim Press 2021). Her collection Love in a Time of Climate Change is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press 2025. Primarily a formalist, her poetry has been included in Treehouse Literary Review, Flint Hills Review, Anacapa Review, and The Lyric. Her essays on sonnet elements have recently appeared in American Poetry Review and Unlikely Stories. Hill holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where her creative thesis was a novel in sonnet verse. She writes, plays fiddle, and is obsessed with gardening in Middlebury, Vermont.

B. Fulton Jennes is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies, including CALYX, Comstock Review, Extreme Sonnets, Rust and Moth, SWWIM, and Tupelo Quarterly. In 2022, “Glyphs of a Gentle Going” was awarded the Lascaux Prize; another poem, “Father to Son,” won the 2023 New Millennium Award. Her collection Blinded Birds received the 2022 International Book Award for a poetry chapbook. FLOWN—an elegy-in-verse to her late sister—was published by Porkbelly Press in April 2024. Jennes is poet laureate emerita of Ridgefield, CT, where she directs the Poetry in the Garden reading series each summer and served for many years as poet-in-residence at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.