Word Thursdays Online featuring Chocolate Waters and Katherine Piedl will broadcast live on Thursday, June 26 at 7 PM EST.
To attend the event, please go to https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81577446746 just before 7:00 pm or visit Bright Hill’s Facebook page to view the live stream.
Suggested donation is $5, and free to students.
Donations to Bright Hill are gratefully accepted via PayPal, by check made out to Bright Hill Press Inc., and mailed to 94 Church Street, Treadwell, NY 13846, or by credit card by personal appointment by emailing [email protected].
Chocolate Waters first appeared in the Bright Hill poetry series at Bertha and Ernie’s Treadwell farmhouse in 1996.
She is a continuously evolving radical feminist poet and celebrant of the new power of the feminine. One of the first openly lesbian poets to produce her work in the U.S., Waters is also a pioneering performance poet, presenting her work as a one-woman show in the mid ’70s.
Chocolate’s first three books of poetry are considered classics of the Second Wave, and her latest book, Melting in Your Mouth: The Early Work of Chocolate Waters, has just been published by Sinister Wisdom, the oldest surviving lesbian lit magazine in the country. Two earlier collections: the woman who wouldn’t shake hands (Poets Wear Prada, 2011, NJ) and Muddying the Holy Waters (Eggplant Press, 2021, NYC) are also available.
Chocolate currently conducts poetry workshops at the Woodstock Sr. Center in Times Square and also tutors individual clients. Check out what she’s up to at www.chocolatewaters.com.
Katherine is a native of Union County, NJ, and works at Shop Rite to pay the rent while writing. She is currently working on a translation of Fájdalmas Péntek (Painful Friday), a remembrance of 32 (mostly young) men who were executed by Russian soldiers in Olaszfalu, Hungary, at the end of WWII. She is also working on her first chapbook collection of poems.
Katherine received her Associate’s degree from Union College, where she received the George P. Zirnite Memorial Scholarship award. She graduated Summa Cum Laude from Rutgers Newark as a non-traditional student during the Covid years, with a degree in English.
She is a cheese lover, working to dispel G.K. Chesterton’s observation that “[p]oets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” Katherine is also a cyclist, ESL tutor, and grandmother to four wild and crazy boys (who also enjoy cheese and poetry).
