NEPC / Voices of Poetry – At the Library (a virtual event)
Saturday, August 22, 2020 at 2:30 pm
Cambridge Public Library
Zoom code: 968 5388 4806
cambridgema.zoom.us/j/96853884806
FREE & open to all.
Cambridge Public Library is pleased to host an online event of exceptional poetry – on Saturday, August 22, 2020 at 2:30 pm – featuring some of our finest contemporary poets. This event – jointly presented by New England Poetry Club and Voices of Poetry – will feature Charles Coe, Regie Gibson, Krysten Hill & Heather Treseler.
Charles Coe is author of three books of poetry: All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents; Picnic on the Moon; and Memento Mori, all published by Leapfrog Press. He is the author of Spin Cycles, a novella published by Gemma Media, and is included in Inspired Journeys: Travel Writers Searching for the Muse (The University of Wisconsin Press). Charles is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected by the Associates of Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light for 2013”. He is also a Fellow at Boston’s St. Botolph Club, a Boston institution which supports the arts and humanities; and is a 2016/17 Artist-in- Residence for Boston.
Poet, performance artist and educator Regie Gibson has lectured and performed in the US, Cuba and Europe. Regie received both the Absolute Poetry Award in Monfalcone and the Europa en Versi Award for performance poetry in LaGuardia di Como, Italy. Regie and his work appear in love jones, a film based on events in his life. He is a National Poetry Slam Champion; has been featured on HBO and several TED events and NPR programs; and was nominated for a Boston Emmy. He has served as consultant for the NEA’s “How Art Works” initiative & “The Mere Distinction of Color”: an exhibit examining the legacy of slavery at James Madison’s Montpelier home. He has composed poems for The Boston City Singers, The Mystic Chorale, Boston’s Handel+Haydn Society and received two Live Arts Boston grants for the development of his first play, The Juke: A Blues Bacchae, in which he uses ancient Greek tragedy to explore African-American spiritual / musical culture. His work has been widely published in anthologies, magazines and journals such as Iowa Review, Harvard Divinity Magazine, Poetry, Spoken Word Revolution (Source Books), The Good Men Project and several others. He performs regularly with Atlas Soul: a world music ensemble, and Shakespeare to Hip-Hop: an education and performance program integrating classical and modern texts into English curriculums. He is on the board at Grubstreet Creative Writing Center and has taught at Emerson College and Clark University.
Krysten Hill is an educator, writer, and performer who has showcased her poetry at The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and Blacksmith House in Cambridge, among many other venues. She received her MFA in poetry from UMass Boston, where she currently teaches. Her work can be found in apt, Word Riot, The Baltimore Review, Muzzle, PANK, Winter Tangerine Review, Take Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 St. Botolph Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award. Her chapbook, How Her Spirit Got Out (Aforementioned Productions, 2016), received the 2017 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize.
Heather Treseler is associate professor of English and the Presidential Fellow for Art, Education and Community at Worcester State University and a visiting scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center. She earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Brown University and, as a Presidential Fellow, a Ph.D. in English at University of Notre Dame. Her chapbook, Parturition (2020), won Munster Literature Centre’s international poetry chapbook prize, and her sequence of poems, The Lucie Odes, won Missouri Review‘s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Her poems appear in Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, and Harvard Review, and her essays about poetry appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, PN Review, Boston Review, and in seven books of criticism.
New England Poetry Club was founded in 1915 by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Conrad Aiken to foster the art of poetic expression. We run the oldest poetry reading series in the country. We offer an ongoing writing workshop open to all members. We sponsor awards and contests to encourage and recognize poetic achievement. And we look for new creative ways to foster understanding and love of poetry. Members of NEPC are poets, publishers, and readers and translators of poetry, who live in New England or have strong ties to the region. We invite you to join us!
Voices of Poetry was formed by Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and poetry activist Neil Silberblatt. Since 2012, VOP has presented more than 400 poetry events in NY, NJ, CT and MA. Those events – which have featured Poets Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winners/nominees, as well as those who have not (yet) published a word – have been presented at numerous venues, including Provincetown Art Association & Museum; Wellfleet Public Library; Brewster Ladies Library; The Rubin Museum of Art and Jefferson Market Library in NYC; and The Mount / Edith Wharton’s home in Lenox, MA. VOP has been awarded grants by Mass. Cultural Council.