High Meadow Mountain Poetry Series

Join us at the High Meadow Mountain Poetry Series at the Wayne Public Library. The group features two poets and includes an Open Mic. Hosted by Paul Nash & Denise LaNeve, representing the North Jersey Literary Community and the Poets of the Palisades. This event is free and all are welcome!

Featured Poets:

Gene Myers is a reporter covering entertainment for The USA Today Company,  whose work appears in USA Today and newspapers across the country. As an entertainment writer, he gets to chat with folks like Steve Martin, Brandi Carlile, John Oliver, and Daryl Hall & John Oates.  As a lit mag editor, he's had the privilege to publish poets such as Franz Wright, Anselm Berrigan, and has interviewed Jane Hirshfield, Charles Simic, and Coleman Barks, among others. His own poems have shown up in places like The Haiku Society of America's Frogpond journal, a broadside from Joshua Beckman's 811 Books, Disco Prairie Social Aid & Pleasure Club by Factory Hollow Press, Paper Wasp, Chrysanthemum, A Handful of Stones, and the Irish Haiku Society's Shamrock Haiku Journal.

John J. Trause, the Director of Oradell Public Library (Bergen County, New Jersey), is the author of The Box of Torrone (Unsolicited Press, 2026), a book of poetry about various flavors of the Italian nougat torrone and cities in Italy; Why Sing? (Sensitive Skin Press, 2017), a book of traditional and experimental poems; Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears (Dos Madres Press, 2016), a book of poems on art, film, and photography; Exercises in High Treason (great weather for MEDIA, 2016), a book of fictive translations, found poems, and manipulated texts; Eye Candy for Andy (13 Most Beautiful… Poems for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Finishing Line Press, 2013); Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round (Nirala Publications, 2012); Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada, 2007; rev. ed. 2014); and Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway.  His translations, poetry, prose, scholarship, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015).  Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets.  

He is the subject of a 30-on-30-in-30 essay on The Operating System, written by Don Zirilli, and an author of an essay on Baroness Elsa at the same site, both in April 2016.  He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, Andrei Codrescu, and Jerome Rothenberg; the page with Billy Collins, Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, Victor Buono, and Pope John Paul II; and the cage with the Cumaean Sibyl, Ezra Pound, Hannibal Lector, Andrei Chikatilo, and George “The Animal” Steele.  

He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative (The Red Wheelbarrow) in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series.  At various times in his life he has been mistaken for being a priest, a policeman, a pimp, and a pornographer. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.