The Bright Hill Literary Center, celebrating their 20th anniversary this year, continues the Word Thursday series this coming Thursday, June 28, 2012 with featured poets YaliniDream and Jay Rogoff after the open mic, which begins at 7 pm, and intermission. Admission is $3 (free to those 18 and under).
YaliniDream, Brooklyn, NY, is Sri Lankan Tamil Blood, Manchester Born, Texas bred and Brooklyn steeped. She conjures spirit through her unique blend of poetry, theater, song, and dance. One of the South Asian American community’s most prominent performance poets, YaliniDream has toured nationally throughout the US as well as Europe & Asia. Her work has been performed at theater venues such as NYC’s Lincoln Center and NY Live Arts (formerly Dance Theater Workshop), Manchester’s Contact Theater, Houston’s Diverse Works, Chicago’s Vittum Theater; poetry venues such as NYC’s Nuyorican Poet’s Café, Minneapolis’s The Loft, London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and universities such as Yale (USA), U of Manchester (UK), Loyola College (India), and U of Peradeniya (Sri Lanka). YaliniDream was a 2006 Mid-Atlantic Artists in Community Fellow at the Asian Arts Initiative, a panelist for the Leeway Foundation’s 2007 Transformation Awards, a 2008 Urban Arts Initiative Fellow, a recipient of the Jerome Foundation’s Travel & Study Award in Literature, and will be an Artist in Residence at UMichigan’s Center for World Performance Studies in Fall 2012. YaliniDream is also a trained aerial dancer in corde lisse who loves to fly– challenging notions of the seemingly impossible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ6c0hrrDPk
Jay Rogoff, Saratoga Springs, NY, is delighted to return to Bright Hill, where he has been a featured reader at the Center and in the Speaking the Words Festival. His fourth book of poems, The Art of Gravity, appeared in 2011 from LSU Press and is obsessed with the relationship of dance to our lives. His previous books include The Long Fault (LSU, 2008), How We Came to Stand on That Shore (River City, 2003), and The Cutoff (Word Works, 1995), winner of the Washington Prize for Poetry, and a new book, Venera, is scheduled for publication late in 2013 from LSU. His poems have appeared in such journals as AGNI, Field, The Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review, and his criticism in a variety of venues as well, especially The Southern Review. He serves as dance critic for The Hopkins Review and The Saratogian, Saratoga Springs’ daily, and also contributes to Ballet Review. His honors include the Robert Watson Poetry Award, leading to publication of his letterpress chapbook Twenty Danses Macabre (Spring Garden, 2010), and a 2010 Pushcart Prize. He lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College.
