September 16 • Basil Rouskas
October 21 • Elizabeth Ann Socolow & Wanda Praisner
November 18 • Bob Rosenbloom & Barbara Crooker
December 9 • Timothy Donnelly & Adam Fitzgerald
Followed by open readings by audience members
Basil Rouskas has been writing poetry for over 30 years. His first poetry lines in the Greek language were protests against the military Junta who took over Greece and ruled it until the mid 70’s. He translated literature and theatre during his first years in the US and gradually his poetry became bilingual. He currently writes mainly in English. His first chapbook, Redrawing Borders, was published in 2010 by Finishing Line Press and drew favorable reviews in the Journal of Hellenic Diaspora in 2012. Basil’s poetry has been featured in many poetry venues, including the New York Times, Princeton Public Library Podcast, Helix Magazine, Shot Glass Journal, and TIFERET, A Journal of Spiritual Literature. www.nov-aspire.com
Wanda S. Praisner is a recipient of fellowships from the NJ State Council on the Arts and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, is author of A Fine and Bitter Snow (Palanquin P, USCA, 2003), On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona (winner of the Spire Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, 2005), and Where the Dead Are, forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. Her poems appear in Atlanta Review, Lullwater Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a resident poet for the NJ State Council on the Arts.
Elizabeth Anne Socolow was a founding member of the US 1 Poets’ Cooperative in 1972, and has published two volumes of poetry. She won the Barnard Poetry Prize in 1987 for Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton which was published by Beacon Press in 1988. In 2006, Ragged Sky Press published Between Silence and Praise. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New York Review, Ms. Magazine, Isotope Magazine and others. In 2006, she won the Isotope Poetry Prize for Asymptotes. She taught poetry and literature at the college level, to high school students and as a Poet in the Schools both in Detroit and for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, which twice awarded her a Poetry Fellowship. A recent scholarly study of the Renaissance poet, Sir Philip Sidney appeared in a book published in England: The Horse as Cultural Icon, edited by Peter Edwards, Karl A. E. Enenkel, and Elspeth Graham. The mother of two sons, and grandmother of three children, she is an avid patio gardener and lives in Lawrenceville.
Barbara Crooker’s work incorporates themes of nature, home, family, love, loss, and disability, and often responds to art, especially paintings. She is the recipient of the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, the WB Yeats Society of NY Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, and was a Grammy finalist in the Spoken Word category. She is a graduate of Douglass College, Rutgers University, and lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is More (C&R Press, 2010).
Robert Rosenbloom hosts a monthly poetry reading at the Bridgewater Public Library for the Somerset Poetry Group. His poetry has appeared in the Paterson Literary Review and Lips. He’s the author of a chapbook, Reunion, published by Finishing Line Press. His day job is lawyer. He lives with his wife in Bound Brook.
Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010; Picador, 2011), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His poems have been widely anthologized and translated and they have appeared in such periodicals as A Public Space, Fence, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, Jubilat, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He has served as poetry editor of Boston Review since 1996. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the New York State Writers Institute and was recently the Theodore H. Holmes ‘51 and Bernice Holmes Visiting Professor at Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing.
He is on the permanent faculty of the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
Adam Fitzgerald is the editor of Maggy, poetry magazine (www.maggymag.com). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Rail, Boston Review, Post Road, The Agricultural Reader and Vanitas. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and The New School, and lives in the East Village.
South Brunswick Library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction
Free Admission • Food Pantry Donation Appreciated