We have another busy week of poetry here in the area kicking off National Poetry Month. Tomorrow night is Nitty Gritty Slam #41, the second Team NGS Semi-Final at Valentine’s in Albany and then we travel up to Saratoga Springs for the monthly Caffe Lena Poetry Open Mic featuring Barbara Louise Ungar and Lee Slonimsky.
This open mic, hosted by Carol Graser, takes place on the first Wednesday of each and every month at Caffè Lena (47 Phila Street, Saratoga Springs). This event has a $5.00 admission charge. Sign up at 7:00, 7:30 readings start.
Barbara Louise Ungar is the author of three full-length poetry collections,Thrift, The Origin of the Milky Way, and Charlotte Bronte You Ruined My Life. She won the Gival Press Poetry Award, an Independent Publishers Award, the Adirondack Center for Writing Poetry Award, and an Eric Hoffer Award for Milky Way. She is also the author of Haiku in English and several chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in many journals, includingSalmagundi. She has performed in many venues, including the Dodge Poetry Festival, the Poetry Society of America, Poets House, St. Marks Church and the Nuyorican Poets Café. She is a professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where she teaches in its new MFA program.
The latest of Lee Slonimsky’s four books of poems is Logician of the Wind, of which Rachel Hadas has written, “…celebrates the macro and micro of the phenomenal world…A remarkable achievement.” .” His work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Measure, New Ohio Review, The New York Times, and Poetry Daily, among other places, and has received seven Pushcart Prize nominations. Collaborating with his wife, Hammett Award winning novelist Carol Goodman, he is co-author of the Lee Carroll Black Swan Rising trilogy.
