Poets in the Park is celebrating nearly 30 years of bringing poetry in July to the Robert Burns statue in Washington Park, Albany, NY. The series was started in 1989 by the late Tom Nattell and is now run by Albany poet & photographer Dan Wilcox. This year the readings will be on Saturdays July 14, 21, and 28; the readings start at 7:00 PM and are free and open to the public; donations are accepted. Rain site is the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave., Albany.
The series is sponsored by the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and the Poetry Motel Foundation.
July 14: Poets from Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology
Published by The University of Georgia Press, this is the first anthology to focus solely on poetry with an eco-justice bent. It is a culturally diverse collection entering a field where nature poetry anthologies have historically lacked diversity, presenting a rich terrain of contemporary environmental poetry with roots in many cultural traditions. The poets reading will be:
Melissa Tuckey is the editor of Ghost Fishing. She is a poet, writer and literary activist living in Ithaca, NY. She is the author of Tenuous Chapel and is a co-founder of Split This Rock, a national organization dedicated to supporting socially engaged poetry.
Tiffany Higgins has published poems in Big Bridge and Kenyon Review; her first book is and Aeneas stares into her helmet. She has translated poems of the Lebanese writer Nadia Tuéni from the French, and poems by Alice Sant’Anna from the Portuguese. She teaches English at several colleges in the San Francisco Bay area.
Gretchen Primack is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Visiting Days, which explores the world of maximum-security men’s prison, and two others, Kind and Doris’s Red Spaces, and co-wrote the animal rights memoir The Lucky Ones with Jenny Brown. She has administrated and taught with college programs in prison for many years.
Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and will be published by W. W. Norton in fall 2019; her first book Frost in the Low Areas won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
July 21: Poets from Coast to Coast: The Route 20 Anthology
Coast to Coast: The Route 20 Anthology, Editors: Charlie Rossiter and Michael Czarnecki. This collection of 65 poems by 56 poets is a paean to Route 20. It’s also a tribute to all blue highways everywhere, the historic roads that let us explore the country and its people at a pace of our own choosing. These roads are the home of the idiosyncratic and marvelous — the people and places that make travel by car such a rewarding choice over other modes of travel. Contributors who will be reading: Peggy and Tom Seely, Carol H. Jewell, Tom Corrado, Mark O’Brien, Alan Casline, Martha Deed, Dan Wilcox and the editors, Charles Rossiter and Michael Czarnecki.
July 28: poetik & Bob Sharkey
Bob Sharkey reads out often and his poems and prose have appeared in many publications. He is the editor of the annual Stephen A DiBiase Poetry Prize contest.
poetik is a poet and author from Brooklyn, New York but currently resides in Troy. She released her debut collection of poems Labyrinth of a Melaninated Being in January.
The Robert Burns statue is located near where Henry Johnson Blvd. passes through Washington Park and crosses Hudson Ave. Please bring your own chairs or blankets to sit on.
For more information about this event contact Dan Wilcox, at dwlcx@earthlink.net; 518-482-0262. More information about the Hudson Valley Writers Guild at www.hvwg.org
