The 2010 Albany Word Fest is not the only poetry event happening this weekend in the upstate New York literary community. Here is some info on a reading happening Saturday afternoon in New Paltz. Still plenty of time to make it back up to the UAG for day two of the Word Fest.
Celebrating National Poetry Month
4:30 p.m., Saturday, April 17 at the Elting Memorial Library, 93 Main St., New Paltz
Award-winning poets Will Nixon and Matthew J. Spireng will help celebrate National Poetry Month with a reading from their work at the Elting Memorial Library.
Nixon will read poems from his new book, Love in the City of Grudges. Spireng will read poems that focus on poets–mostly famous, and sometimes not—and poetry.
Matthew J. Spireng, of Lomontville, is a lifelong Ulster County resident and former resident of New Paltz. His book Out of Body won the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award and was published in 2006 by Bluestem Press at Emporia State University. His chapbooks are: Young Farmer; Encounters; Inspiration Point, winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Just This. His book What Focus Is is forthcoming in 2011 from Word Press.
Will Nixon’s new poetry book, Love in the City of Grudges (FootHills Publishing), ranges from childhood reveries to the misadventures of a young man in gentrifying Hoboken in the 1980s to a series of poems that mixes family history with Night of the Living Dead. His previous collection, My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse (FootHills Publishing), described his move from mid-town Manhattan to a Catskills log cabin in 1996. With Michael Perkins he is the co-author of Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town, a book that began as essays for the Woodstock Times and became the #1 paperback bestseller of 2009 at the Golden Notebook, Woodstock’s indepeNdent bookstore. Will Nixon lives in Woodstock. His website is willnixon.com.
