Tag: Williams Center for the Arts

WCW – George Witte & Tina Kelley

WCW 10 1 14 blog

George Witte & Tina Kelley

Wednesday, October 1, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

George Witte has published three books of poems: Does She Have a Name? (NYQ Books, 2014), Deniability (Orchises Press, 2009), and The Apparitioners (Orchises Press, 2005). A New Jersey native, he works as the editor in chief of St. Martin’s Press and lives with his family in Ridgewood.

Tina Kelley’s second collection of poetry, Precise, was published in 2013 by Word Press, which also published her first collection, The Gospel of Galore, winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, (2012) a national bestseller about homeless young people helped by Covenant House. She was a reporter at The New York Times for ten years, shared in a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service Journalism for being a part of the Times’ coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, and wrote 121 Portraits of Grief, short descriptions of the victims. Her writing has appeared in Audubon, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Orion, People, Poetry Northwest, Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009. She is on the staff of Covenant House and lives in Maplewood, NJ with her husband and two children.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

GV – RWB poets read, Victoria Warne plays

On Friday September 5, 2014, Mark Fogarty, the host and producer of the GainVille Café Reading Series, will feature readings from the poets published in Red Wheelbarrow # 7. If you aren’t able to attend the launch on September 3rd please join us on the 5th. If you’ve already read on Sept. 3 come to GainVille and you can read the poems you didn’t have time for at the September 3rd launch!

Musical guest will be Victoria Warne, a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter who has performed extensively in the New York Metropolitan area. She has recorded with Danny Gottlieb, Spyro Gyra’s Julio Fernandez, and even shared the stage with legendary jazz great Billy Eckstine. She has recorded 2 CDs as a leader, Live At The Savoy and Fluorescence.

The GainVille Café is located at 17 Ames Ave., in Rutherford, NJ. The festivities start at 7 p.m.

A $7 cover includes coffee/tea and dessert.

Copies of Red Wheelbarrow # 7 will be available for purchase.

WCW – Launch of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets #7

Wednesday, September 3, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

—————

Friday, September 5, 2014, 7 p.m.

GainVille Cafe
Seventeen Ames Avenue, Rutherford NJ

The Red Wheelbarrow Poets will launch the gorgeous 7th edition of their yearly publication, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, with readings at the William Carlos Williams Center in Rutherford, NJ on Wednesday, Sept. 3, and at GainVille Café, also Rutherford, Friday, Sept. 5, both at 7 PM.

The book features a stunning cover by Melanie Klein and the poetry and prose of a record 45 area writers who have either participated in the RWP’s long-running weekly poetry workshop or who have read their work at the Williams Center or GainVille Café in the past year. More than 15 interior drawings have been supplied by poet and artist Don Zirilli.

The overall theme of the book again is Dr. Williams’ observation that the epic is the local fully realized. Many of the writers in the volume adhere to Williams’ groundbreaking poetic philosophy of writing about the everyday in vibrant, “live” language.

This year’s featured poet is Mark Fogarty. He is a Rutherford poet, musician and journalist who has written three books of poetry published by White Chickens Press: Myshkin’s Blues, Peninsula, and Phantom Engineer.

The revival of poetry in Rutherford, Dr. Williams’ home town, began when poet John J. Trause, along with Jane Fisher, director of the Rutherford Public Library, founded the Williams Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative of Southern Bergen County. From 2006 through 2012, John J. Trause ran the monthly readings at the Williams Center, featuring poets from the tri-state area as well as from further afield. This First Wednesday series now is run by the “Gang of Four” (Claudia Serea, John Barrale, Don Zirilli and Zorida Mohammed).

The RWP weekly poetry workshop at Rutherford Borough Hall, now in its seventh year, is run by Jim Klein, the leader of the Red Wheelbarrow Poets. It is free and open to all local poets.

The Red Wheelbarrow poets also read at the GainVille Café on the last Friday of each month in a music and poetry event organized by poet/musician Mark Fogarty with the participation of his friends and acquaintances in the music world. Recent featured musicians have included Lisa Bianco, George Pereny and Victoria Warne, who will perform at GainVille Sept. 5.

Both the Williams Center and the GainVille readings offer an open mic to poets who are also invited to submit their work for next year’s publication. Copies of the book will be on sale at both events and are also available online at http://www.lulu.com/shop/red-wheelbarrow-poets/rutherford-red-wheelbarrow-7/paperback/product-21760712.html.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

WCW – Adele Kenny, Gail Fishman Gerwin, and Bob Rosenbloom


Adele Kenny
Gail Fishman Gerwin
Bob Rosenbloom

Wednesday, August 6, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Adele Kenny is the author of twenty-four books (poetry & nonfiction). Her poems, reviews, and articles have been published worldwide, and her poems have appeared in books and anthologies published by Crown, Tuttle, Shambhala, and McGraw-Hill. She is the recipient of various awards, including poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council, first place Merit Book and Henderson Awards, a Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, a Writer’s Digest Poetry Award, and the 2012 International Book Award. She is founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series and poetry editor of Tiferet. Website: www.Adelekenny.com.

Gail Fishman Gerwin’s memoir Sugar and Sand was a finalist for the 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her second collection Dear Kinfolk, (www.chayacairnpress.com) earned a 2013 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. She also is the author of Bella’s Family, a two-act play about a Jewish immigrant family in the early 20th century; Dropping Names, a one-act play about old loves; and Women in Motion, a monologue set. Her poems, reviews, fiction, features, and essays appear in print and online. Gail, associate poetry editor of Tiferet, facilitates writing workshops at varied venues.

Robert Rosenbloom hosts a monthly poetry reading at the Bridgewater Public Library for the Somerset Poetry Group. His poetry has appeared in the Paterson Literary Review, US 1 Worksheets, Lips, Edison Literary Review, among others. He’s the author of a chapbook, Reunion, published by Finishing Line Press. He is a certified civil trial lawyer. He lives with his wife in Bound Brook.

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

WCW – ZORIDA MOHAMMED

Zorida Mohammed

Zorida Mohammed

Wednesday, July 2, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

ZORIDA MOHAMMED was born in Trinidad and came to the US when she was a teenager. She received an MSW from Fordham University School of Social Work and has worked in the mental health profession for 28 plus years. Her chapbook She Called Me Girlee was published recently by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have been published in The Caribbean Writer, Folio, Poem, The Atlanta Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Fulcrum #6 and #7, Phoebe, Oyez Review, Compass Rose, The Dirty Goat # 20, Bayou Magazine, The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, The Distillery, Quercus Review, and other publications. She enjoys cooking and has many awards for horticulture. Zorida won a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant for poetry in 1991-92.

Remember Dadee

I looked for a glow above your bed.
I looked in the rafters and corners,
but your life was gone.
It had slipped out under the eaves,
or the open half
of your Dutch door.

There was nothing but gravel in the street.

WCW – Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri

Wednesday, June 4, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954, and came to America as a small child. He is the author of four collections of poems: Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow (winner of the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award), and 3 Sections (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), which have all been published by Graywolf Press; The Disappearances, published by Harper-Collins India; and many essays, reviews, and memoir fragments. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

3_Sections

The People I Know

“Your friendship has meaning for me,” the people I know say,
“but you didn’t create me. In and of myself,
I’m just like the water pouring through the spillway
or the bird on that wire, bright-yellow, with elegant black piping.
Which is to say, my relationship is not to you
but to my limitless surroundings, and it suffices.”
The days when nothing, or nothing much, happens
are the ones they can’t forget, the people I know.
They take the car in to get its oil changed,
its tires checked and rotated.
She at the grimy counter and He, out back jimmying
the hydraulic lift, aren’t speaking to each other today.
Two people who live in the world, our world,
hate each other everlastingly today.
Anger is blossoming from the heart of the trivial, the pointless.
Self-esteem is leaking and oozing
over the concrete floor to pool around the feet.
Its color is the pink color of anti-freeze. The air is stringent
with the smell of anti-freeze.
“I’ve experienced that feeling, I’ve felt that feeling, too,”
the people I know want to say,
but too long have distance, decorum, and self-consciousness governed
the interactions they have with those
who take care of their machines for them to break out
of the cotton-mouthed suffocations of the same,
of their sameness, which is, to be fair, mystifying to them.
“But . . . but . . . it’s killing me, Jake, the pain is killing me.”
So the people I know wander out
onto Auto Body Avenue, and think about
the explosions of noise on this major artery of their city,
the traffic in the proximate empyrean,
the intricacies of the nitrogen cycle,
the dance of the universe from the atoms to the stars.
The people I know stare into the plate-glass
coffee-shop windows at the shrunken heads sitting at the counter.
No one can tell me anything more about the people I know
than what I know already about the people I know.
One man I know is dining with a man he knows.
One woman I know has met a woman with her exact name,
who is from Bessarabia,
though she herself is from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
One girl I know is waiting to be born.
One boy I know is taking a nap.

WCW – Loren Kleinman

Loren Kleinman

Loren Kleinman

Wednesday, May 7, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Loren Kleinman’s poetry has appeared in journals such as Nimrod, Wilderness House Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, Narrative Northeast and New Jersey Poets. Her interviews appeared in IndieReader, USA Today, and The Huffington Post. She is the author of Flamenco Sketches and Indie Authors Naked, which was an Amazon Top 100 bestseller in Journalism in the UK and USA. Her second poetry collection The Dark Cave Between My Ribs was released in March 2014 (Winter Goose Publishing). Kleinman is currently working on a literary romance novel, This Way to Forever and her third collection of poetry Breakable Things. She runs an author interview series on The Huffington Post Books community blogs vertical. Kleinman is a faculty member at New York Writers Workshop.

My Body Opens

A tulip blooms
between my breasts.

A petal
shaky and falling
from the wind
glitters like a star
under my nipple.

A smudge of blood
at the seam.
A fingerprint
and a petal.

WCW – Don Zirilli

Don Zirilli

Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Don Zirilli was born an island. He graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s in English Literature. His poetry has been published in River Styx, Art Times, iota and other places. He is a naturalized Red Wheelbarrow Poet and the editor of Now Culture, whatever that is. Check him out at http://zirealism.com.

Bakelite Recorder

It belonged to my mother. She gave it to me
when it started playing its own tunes.
She learned music from it, but the music
wanted to be forgotten. She couldn’t have it
in the house with her, the way it knew so much,
the way everything in the air filtered through it.
I will give it to you for half price
if it likes your fingers.

Alex Cigale & Larissa Shmailo – New Date

The Williams Readings present

ALEX CIGALE & LARISSA SHMAILO

NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH

Wednesday, February 19, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Alex Cigale’s translations from Russian, and his own English-language poems, have appeared in Cimarron, Colorado, Cortland, Green Mountains, New England, The Literary Reviews, Drunken Boat, Interlit Quarterly, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, and PEN America. He’s on the editorial boards of Asymptote, COEUR journal, The Madhatters’ Review, The St. Petersburg Review, Third Wednesday, and Verse Junkies. From 2011 until 2013, he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia.

Larissa Shmailo is the editor of the new anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. Larissa translated the zaum opera Victory Over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s landmark restaging of the work and has been a translator and writer on the Bible in Russia for the American Bible Society. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in The Common, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Drunken Boat, Fulcrum, Madhat, Lungfull!, Jacket, and the anthologies Words for the Wedding (Penguin), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive), and the Unbearables Big Book of Sex (Autonomedia). Her books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew). Her newest poetry collection, #specialcharacters, is forthcoming from Unlikely Books.

Alex Cigale & Larissa Shmailo

The Williams Readings present

ALEX CIGALE & LARISSA SHMAILO

NATIONAL TRANSLATION MONTH

Wednesday, February 5, 2014, 7 p.m.

Williams Center for the Arts
One Williams Plaza, Rutherford NJ

Plus the words of William Carlos Williams
and open readings from the floor

Contact: John Barrale – john.barrale@gmail.com

Alex Cigale’s translations from Russian, and his own English-language poems, have appeared in Cimarron, Colorado, Cortland, Green Mountains, New England, The Literary Reviews, Drunken Boat, Interlit Quarterly, Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, and PEN America. He’s on the editorial boards of Asymptote, COEUR journal, The Madhatters’ Review, The St. Petersburg Review, Third Wednesday, and Verse Junkies. From 2011 until 2013, he was Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia.

Larissa Shmailo is the editor of the new anthology Twenty-first Century Russian Poetry and founder of The Feminist Poets in Low-Cut Blouses. Larissa translated the zaum opera Victory Over the Sun for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s landmark restaging of the work and has been a translator and writer on the Bible in Russia for the American Bible Society. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in The Common, Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, Drunken Boat, Fulcrum, Madhat, Lungfull!, Jacket, and the anthologies Words for the Wedding (Penguin), Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive), and the Unbearables Big Book of Sex (Autonomedia). Her books of poetry are In Paran (BlazeVOX [books]), the chapbook A Cure for Suicide (Cervena Barva Press), and the e-book Fib Sequence (Argotist Ebooks); her poetry CDs are The No-Net World and Exorcism (SongCrew). Her newest poetry collection, #specialcharacters, is forthcoming from Unlikely Books.