We return to McGeary’s on Monday, August 26 for another edition of Poets Speak Loud. This month we welcome one of the finest poets in the nation to our stage as our featured reader, Bertha Rogers.
Bertha is the founding director and editor in chief of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York’s Catskill Mountain Region. As director, she serves as administrator of the NYSCA Literary Curators Web Site, www.nyslittree.org and the New York State Literary Map. She serves on a Catskills Region Arts in Education panel as well as the New York State Council on the Arts Writers in the Schools panel.
Back in April of this year, Bertha Rogers was one of the poets who read at Poets Against Fracking event the UAG Gallery for day two of the 2013 Albany Word Fest.
Here is a little more information on Bertha Rogers from her website:
Bertha Rogers, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, is a poet, translator, visual artist, and master teaching artist. More than 250 of her poems and critical reviews have appeared in such journals as Many Mountains Moving, The MacGuffin, Connecticut Review, Laurel Review, Karamu, Nimrod, Chelsea, Pivot, Yankee, and Barrow Street; and in several anthologies. Her poetry collections include Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, 1991),The Fourth Beast (Snark Publishing, 2004), For the Girl Buried in the Peat Bog (Six Swans Artists Editions, 1999), and A House of Corners, winner of the Maryland State Poetry Society and Review Competition (Three Conditions Press, Baltimore, 2000). Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic,Beowulf, was published in 2000 by Birch Brook Press, Delhi, NY, and her interdisciplinary Beowulf exhibit with readings and workshops toured the U.S. from 2000-2002. In 2005, she published Even the Hemlock, a collection of words and images from her “Even the Hemlock: Reliquaries and Illuminations” exhibit, traveling throughout New York since 2003. The exhibit and book were funded through grants from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Grant Program. She has also received a fellowship from the AE Foundation. Her word-and-image works are in the Harry Ransom Collection, the University of Texas and other public and private collections. In 2007 her exhibit “The Stones & Bones of Delaware County” was awarded a NYSCA grant and was exhibited in museums and galleries in Delaware County, NY and at the Hamilton Club Gallery, Paterson, NY (March-April 2008). In 2009, her exhibit, “Riddle Me This: The Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Poems Translated for Our Time and Place,” received a New York State Council on the Arts Decentralization Program grant and toured Delaware County, opening at the Elijah Thomas Gallery, Delaware County Historical Association Museum in Delhi; then traveling to the historic Hanford Mills Museum in East Meredith. In November the exhibit will be at the Roxbury Library Association in Roxbury, then travel to the W. H. Adams Bookstore in Hobart. In 2010 the exhibit toured other locations in New York.
Poets Speak Loud is Albany Poets’ long-running monthly open mic for poetry and spoken word with a featured poet hosted by local poet Mary Panza at McGeary’s (4 Clinton Square) in downtown Albany on the last Monday of each and every month.
Sign-up for the open mic is 7:00pm, we start around 8pm.
Bertha Rogers at Book As Art Exhibit from Peg Johnston on Vimeo.
