Tea and Conversation with Award-Winning Poet Tina Kelley

Join us for tea and conversation as Julie Maloney, Director of Women Reading Aloud, conducts an up-close and personal interview with award-winning poet Tina Kelley at Bernardsville Public Library on Sunday, March 26 at 2:00 pm. Audience members will have a rare opportunity to ask the author questions about her work and her writing process. A book signing will follow the interview; books will be available for purchase.

Tina Kelley’s third poetry collection, "Abloom and Awry," is coming out in April 2017 from CavanKerry Press. Her second collection, "Precise," was published in 2013 by Word Press, which also published her first collection, "The Gospel of Galore," winner of a 2003 Washington State Book Award. She co-authored "Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope," (2012) a national bestseller about homeless young people helped by Covenant House. She was a reporter at The New York Times for ten years, shared in a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service Journalism for being a part of the Times’ coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, and wrote 121 “Portraits of Grief,” short descriptions of the victims. Her writing has appeared in Audubon, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Orion, People, Poetry Northwest, Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry 2009, and on the buses of Seattle Washington. She won the 2014 New Jersey Poets Prize. A graduate of Mendham High School, she now lives in Maplewood, NJ with her husband and two children.

Interviewer Julie Maloney has worked in the arts as a performer and educator her entire life. She is a poet and writer and founder/director of Women Reading Aloud (WRA), a not-for-profit organization that promotes women writers in New Jersey and beyond. WRA holds workshops, special events, writing retreats, conferences and an on-going writing workshop series each spring and fall during which women writers of all genres hone their work in a salon type setting. The annual Writer’s Weekend Retreat is held each April in Sea Girt, NJ. Last June, WRA returned to the island of Alonnisos in the North Sporades for its sixth Writer’s Retreat in Greece. Ms. Maloney is a frequent speaker on “Writing as a Life Tool.” Her debut novel, “A Matter of Chance,” will be published by SheWrites Press in spring, 2018.

There is no charge to attend the program at the library, but advance sign-up is requested. Register online at www.bernardsvillelibrary.org and follow the link from Adult Programs, or call the library at 908-766-0118 to sign up.