Fourteen talented New England poets will gather in Café II at Asnuntuck Community College on Monday, October 17, 2011, at 7:00 PM, to read their poetry in the Freshwater Poets Coffee House. The poets are all featured in the Twelfth annual issue of Asnuntuck’s internationally known poetry journal, Freshwater, published in May 2011. The journal is put together by student editors working in a poetry magazine production class with Edwina Trentham, Professor of English. Each year the editors read two thousand poems submitted by poets throughout the United States and from many parts of the world, in order to select approximately seventy poems that are published in the journal. Poems by the winners of the yearly Asnuntuck Student Poetry Contest, open to all twelve Connecticut Community colleges, as well as Connecticut Public Universities and selected Connecticut local high schools, are also published in each issue. The Nineteenth Annual Student Poetry Contest was judged by award winning poet, Sue Ellen Thompson, and three of the winners are among the readers on October 17.
Dianne Bilyak is from Stafford Springs, and her first collection of poetry, Against the Turning, was recently published by AWA Press in Amherst, Massachusetts. Roberta Whitman Hoff, an editor of Freshwater, won second prize in Asnuntuck’s Nineteenth Annual Student Poetry Contest. Susan Johnson, who teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, has published in a number of periodicals, and her first book, Impossible is Nothing, was recently published by Finishing Line Press. Asnuntuck student, Julia Martinez, is from Enfield and won second honorable mention in Asnuntuck’s Nineteenth Annual Student Poetry Contest. Simsbury poet, Rennie McQuilkin is the author of ten poetry collections, the founder of Antrim House Books, and directed the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival at Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington for many years. Gaynell Meij, from East Haddam, once a geologist, is now a naturalist, an artist, and a poet. Pat O’Brien, an award winning poet from Old Saybrook, is a member of the Guilford Poetry Guild and a facilitator of poetry workshops. Lana Orphanides, from Groton, is a painter who is also a widely published poet, and has exhibited and read her work throughout Connecticut. Steve Parlato, from Waterbury, is an English Instructor at Naugatuck Valley Community College, who has won many prizes and has read his work extensively. His young adult novel, Junior, won a 2011 Tassy Walden Award for New Voices In Children’s Literature. Laurel Peterson, a Professor of English at Norwalk Community College, has published her work in a variety of periodicals and has two chapbooks, one published by Last Automat Press and the other by Finishing Line Press. Dr. Mary Clare Powell is Professor of Creative Arts in Learning at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has three collections of poetry in print. Bessy Reyna is an award winning Latina poet who lives in Bolton, Connecticut, and has published three poetry collections, the most recent being a bilingual collection, Memoirs of the Unfaithful Lover. John Stanizzi is an adjunct professor of English at Manchester Community College, who teaches English at Bacon Academy in Colchester. He has published two books with Antrim House, Ecstasy Among Ghosts and Sleepwalking. Allison Zaczynski, the third prizewinner of Asnuntuck’s Nineteenth Annual Student Poetry Contest and winner of the 2011 Asnuntuck Excellence in Poetry Award, is a Suffield resident who currently attends Central Connecticut University.
Refreshments will be served, and the reading is free and open to the public. Copies of books by many of the featured poets, as well as copies of Freshwater 2011, will be on sale. An open poetry mic will follow the reading. For more information contact Edwina Trentham at 860-253-3105 or ETrentham@acc.commnet.edu.
