The event will take place on Wednesday eve, November 9, from 7-9 p.m. at the Providence Athenaeum, 251 Benefit Street, Providence, in the downstairs reading room. After the reading, members of the audience can talk with the poets, check out the chapbooks, and enjoy refreshments.
The series was born during a panel discussion about publishing at URI and produces chapbooks that are deliberately short and sweet with most editions twelve pages long. Thanks to the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, which has generously funded the series for several years, copies are also sent to high schools, where students can see what’s happening right now in the poetry world around them.
We look forward to seeing you and friends on November 9th.
Here’s a run-down of the readers
CATHLEEN CALBERT
Cathleen Calbert is the author of two books of poetry: Lessons in Space (University of Florida Press) and Bad Judgment (Sarabande Books). Individually, her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Ms., The New Republic, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Women’s Review of Books. She has been awarded The Nation Discovery Prize, the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart Prize. Currently, she is a Professor of English at Rhode Island College.
MICHELE F. COOPER, hosting
Michele F. Cooper is founding editor of the Newport Review literary broadside and the Premier Poets Chapbook Series. She is the author of two books and widely published poems and stories in journals such as Larcom and Fiction International, and won the 2002 TallGrass Poetry Competition and second place in the 1999 Galway Kinnell competition.
AUDREY FRIEDMAN
Audrey Friedman is an 8th grade English teacher at Davisville Middle School in North Kingstown, RI. She received an MFA in Poetry from at Vermont College in January, 2005. Her work has been published in a number of literary journals including California Quarterly, The Broad River Review, The Newport Review, The Griffin, Urban Spaghetti, and The Comstock Review, and her chapbook, “Gallery of the Surreal,” was published by the Premier Poets.
LEE GLANTZ
Lee Glantz, a poet and batik artist, lives in Barrington, RI. Her poems have appeared in West Crook Review, Muddy River Review, Crone’s Nest, Quarters of the Mind, and R.I. Roads. Com. A chapbook of nine poems, A House on Her Back, was recently published in the Premier Poets Chapbook Series.
PAT HEGNAUER
Pat Hegnauer is best known for her work as Artistic Director of 2nd Story Theatre, where she produced and directed over two hundred plays in theatre locations in Newport and Providence. She was named "Best Director of the Year" by the Providence Journal on more than one occasion. Her poems have been published in many journals. She’s had staged readings of her plays at URI, where she won the New Playwright award in 1996 and 1997. Her one-act plays have been given full productions in RI and NYC.
TINA LETCHER
Tina Letcher lives in Kingston, has for many years published her poetry, led creative writing workshops and edited a literary magazine, Northeast Journal. She has just returned from a "reality tour" in Chiapas, Mexico, where she listened to the stories of indigenous Mayans and began to understand why the rebellious Zapatistas had issued their own Red Alert days before her group arrived.
ROBERT J. OBERG
Robert J. Oberg serves as director of the Olney Street Group, an independent poetry workshop which he founded in 1982. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Commonweal, Cottonwood, Connecticut River Review, Poetrybay, Lake Effect and several other magazines. He was the winner of the 1991 Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize and a finalist in the 2004 Prairie Schooner Prize Book Series.
SHULLA SANNELLA
Shulla Sannella is a poet and fiction writer living and working in northern RI. She is the author of two chapbooks and has been published locally in Crone's Nest Magazine and the Newport Review. She is currently a staff writer for the River Valley Current in Douglas, MA.
ADA JULL SCHNEIDER
Ada Jill Schneider, winner of the Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize, is the author of Fine Lines and Other Wrinkles, The Museum of My Mother, Poems for Grandma and Me, and Saudades: The Jewish-Portuguese Connection. After receiving her MFA in Writing from Vermont College, she initiated “The Pleasure of Poetry,” a program she directs at the Somerset Public Library.
ELIZABETH STABLER
Elizabeth Stabler lives in Bristol, Rhode Island. Her poetry will appear in the anthology Regrets Only, forthcoming from Little Pear Press. It has also appeared in Crone's Nest and The Newport Review, as well as in her chapbook In This Moment…Another Glistens.
AMANDA SURKONT
Amanda Surkont's work has appeared in Art Life, Concrete Wolf, The Puckerbrush Review, the Newport Review and other journals. Her chapbook, Nothing Happens Here, was published in the Premier Poets Chapbook Series in 2003. She hopes, through her poems, to preserve a generation of lost voices. She is poetry editor at Rhode Island Roads Magazine (riroads.com).
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GAYL TELLER
Gayl Teller is the author of four collections, most recently One Small Kindness (Plain View Press, Austin, TX), which was a finalist in the Blue Light Competition. She is founder/director of the Poetry Reading Series (NYSCA) at the Mid-Island Y, Plainview, NY, now in its 10th year, teaches at Hofstra University, and won the Edgar Allan Poe Prize for Literature, a National League of American PEN Women Poetry Prize, and First Prize in the Peninsula Library Poetry Competition. She was most recently published in the Anthology of World Congress of Poets for Poetry Research and Recitation, which won the Silla Gold Crown World Peace Literature Prize.
SONDRA ZEIDENSTEIN
Sondra Zeidenstein’s poems have been published in magazines, journals and anthologies, and in a chapbook collection entitled Late Afternoon Woman. A Detail in that Story is her first book. A second collection, Resistance, was published in 2003. She is editor of A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence and Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children, and publisher of Chicory Blue Press (www.chicorybluepress.com), a small literary press that focuses on the writing of older women.
