Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar 2

THRESH & HOLD is a book of poems re-coded into a collaborative ceremony of composed and improvisational music, dance, poetry, and short film.

“Exhausted of singing in an empire’s hopeful choir,” Dekine’s poems play with past, present, and future, all held within any moment, remembering the power of Black imagination for collective ancestral healing. Join Marlanda Dekine for an evening-length, multimedia experience centered around their forthcoming full-length debut poetry collection, Thresh & Hold (Hub City Press, 2022).

With collaborative artists Victoria Lynn Awkward (Dance), Brittany J. Green (Composer), Mahkia Greene (Film), Zahili Gonzalez Zamora (Music), and Emily Bearce (Lights).

Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and offers individual manuscript conferences at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, the NYT, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day, and Ted Kooser’s  column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her books include Talking Underwater and Second Skin (Wind Publications, 2007 and 2010); Galapagos Poems (Kattywompus Press, 2016); Echolocation (Plume Editions Madhat Press, 2018). Echolocation was long-listed or runner-up for Best Book of the Year from the Julie Suk Award, the Eric Hoffer Prize and the Poetry by The Sea Prize, all in 2018. To buy it: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1941196551/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications, his poetry appears in The American Journal of Poetry, Massachusetts Review, On the Seawall, Rattle, Shenandoah and Tar River Poetry. Robert is a poetry editor with Indolent Books and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Additional information, including book purchase information, can be found at robertcarr.org

Jennifer De Leon is the author of Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From (Atheneum/Simon & Schuster, 2020) and the editor of Wise Latinas (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2014). An Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Framingham State University, and a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction program at Bay Path University, she has published prose in over a dozen literary journals and is a GrubStreet instructor and board member. Her essay collection, White Space: Essays on Culture, Race, & Writing, is the recipient of the Juniper Prize and will be published by UMass Press in Spring 2021. Signed copies of her book may be ordered through Word on the Street Books: https://wordstreetbooks.indielite.org/ Ask for a signed copy in the checkout comment box. Bookshop.org is also an option (but not for signed copies): bookshop.org.

To receive a Zoom invitation with a link to the reading, email your name and email address to SandeeStorey@fastmail.fm before 2 pm on March 11. You will be emailed a Zoom invitation with the link by noon March 12. For security reasons, please do not publicize, post, or broadcast the Zoom link itself. If people you know want to attend, you may send them the link, but please ask them also not to publicize, post, or broadcast the link itself.

For more information, check our website at http://jamaicapondpoets.com or email dorothy.derifield@gmail.com or call 617-325-8388. The next Chapter and Verse Literary Reading on Zoom in the 2020/2021 series will be at 7:30 pm on Friday, April 9, 2021.