Next Year’s Words Featuring Ann Lauinger, David Appelbaum, and Violet Snow

Next Year’s Words: a New Paltz Reading Forum presents three brilliant writers, Ann Lauinger, David Appelbaum, and Violet Snow, reading on Wednesday, February 15, at 7:30 p.m.

LIVE at the Elting Memorial Library’s Steinberg Room and via ZOOM.

Among poet and Professor Emerita Ann Lauinger’s wide range of work is the darkly humorous homage to Andrew Marvell’s To his Coy Mistress called Marvell Noir, which begins, Sweetheart, if we had the time, /A week in bed would be no crime./ I’d light your Camels, pour your Jack;/ You’d do shiatsu on my back./ When you got up to scramble eggs,/ I’d write a sonnet to your legs,/

Poet and Professor David Appelbaum explores the familial and emotional lives of characters amidst an alive and omnipresent rural island landscape in a poem called Clothesline. Rain or shine, her dresses/ hang from the clothesline, lofting or sagging/ the way her life airs out, always washed,/ folded, pressed flat, starched/ as though their cleanliness brought pleasure/ enough to sail through the week on a light raft.

And Violet Snow, a fiction writer, memoirist, and freelance journalist, imagines the lives of ancestors affecting and caught up in historical currents. From To March or To Marry,
She didn’t look back to see if Charles was watching from the front stoop. By the time she reached the streetcar stop, the mix of fear and rage had turned entirely to rage. She remembered she had no money for the car, since Charles had taken her bag. Without bloomers to cover her legs, there was no point in going back for her bicycle.

As always, there will be an open mic.

Donations are welcome.

Live at 7:30 pm on February 15, 2023 at the Elting Memorial Library, 93 Main St., New Paltz, NY, and register on Zoom at https://cutt.ly/NYW-Feb-2023