2013 Poetry Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Simone Beaubien

Annual Youth Poetry Slam — Saturday 1:00 PM

Simone Beaubien is a decade-plus-veteran of the New England slam poetry scene, seven-time competitor at the National Poetry Slam, and SlamMaster of the world-famous Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge. Called "the woman who made Wednesday night Saturday night" by Harlym125, she has hosted the Cantab's weekly show since 2004 and appeared as an MC from coast to coast, including the 2007 Individual World Poetry Slam Finals in Vancouver and the 2010 College Poetry Slam Invitational Finals in Boston. She proudly served as the Host City Director for the wildly successful 2011 National Poetry Slam in Boston and will direct the event again in 2013. She works a paramedic in the greater Boston area.

Rafael Campo

The Poetry of Rafael Campo and January O'Neil — Saturday 10:00 AM

Rafael Campo, M.A., M.D., D. Litt., is a poet and essayist who teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is also on the faculty of Lesley University’s Creative Writing MFA Program. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Poetry Series award, and a Lambda Literary Award for his poetry; his third collection of poetry, Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and his most recent, The Enemy (Duke, 2007), won the Sheila Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation’s oldest poetry organizations. In 2009, he received the Nicholas E. Davies Memorial Scholar Award from the American College of Physicians, for outstanding humanism in medicine. His work has also been selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and has appeared in many prominent periodicals including The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, Salon.com, Slate.com., and the Washington Post Book World. Dr. Jerome Groopman, writing in the New York Times Book Review, says of his work, “Valuable and moving… he is undaunted by the ugliness of the physical deterioration apparent before his eyes, seeking always to capture the beauty of the human soul in struggle with physical reality;” The Los Angeles Times calls it “Reminiscent of Chekhov… in the way language comes up out of the body.”

Michael Cantor

Coffee with the Poets — Saturday 8:30 AM

Michael Cantor is the author of a full length poetry collection, Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012) and a chapbook, The Performer, published in 2007. His poems have appeared in The Dark Horse, Raintown Review, SCR, Off the Coast, Measure, Umbrella, and many other journals and anthologies. Honors include the New England Poetry Club Gretchen Warren and Erika Mumford Awards and First Prize in the NAA Poetry Competition. He has been a finalist for the Richard Wilbur, Nemerov, Morton Marr and Able Muse Book poetry awards. He resides on nearby Plum Island, and is a long time Powow River Poets member.

Charles Coe

The Poetry of Charles Coe and Mimi White — Saturday 2:00 PM

Charles Coe’s poetry and prose has appeared in numerous newspapers and literary reviews and magazines. Two volumes of his poetry have been published by Leapfrog Press: Picnic on the Moon and All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents. His poems have been set to music by composers Julia Carey, Beth Denisch and Robert Moran. Charles also writes feature articles, book reviews and interviews for publications such as Harvard Magazine, Northeastern University Law Review and the Boston Phoenix. After winning a poetry fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Charles joined the agency in 1997 and now serves as a grants program officer.
(photo credit: Roberto Mighty)

David Davis

Coffee with the Poets — Saturday 8:30 AM

David Davis has been a member of the Powow River Poets since 2005. He is an artificial intelligence researcher and high-tech entrepreneur with a long-term interest in writing. A story of his in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, anthologized and translated into multiple languages, was listed as one of the top 20 science fiction short stories of its year. Davis has edited or written five books in his area of technical expertise, has published one book of poetry, and is currently working on Poetry in The Field, an anthology of poems begun with notes taken on site.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Coffee with the Poets — Saturday 8:30 AM

Sparring with the Sun: Poets and the Ways We Think about Poetry
in the Late Days of Modernism – Saturday 3:00 PM

Rhina P. Espaillat has published eight full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poems, essays and short stories in both English and her native Spanish. She has also published translations in both directions, including work by St. John of the Cross, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Robert Frost, and has won various national awards, in the U.S.A and the Dominican Republic, for work in both languages, including the Richard Wilbur Award, the Nemerov Prize, The Robert Frost "Tree at My Window" Translation Prize, the May Sarton Award, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College.

Freddy Frankel

The Poetry of Freddy Frankel and Afaa Michael Weaver — Saturday 1:00 PM

Originally from South Africa, Freddy Frankel earned an advanced degree in psychiatry from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before migrating with his family to the US in 1962. He was on the faculty of Harvard Medical School since 1969 and served as Psychiatrist-in-Chief at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston from 1986 to 1997. Now retired from active practice he has shifted his focus to poetry, attending poetry classes at the Harvard Extension School and studying with Barbara Helfgott Hyett in her Workshop for Publishing Poets. His chapbook, Hottentot Venus, was published by Pudding House Publications in 2003; his first book, In A Stone's Hollow, by Fairweather, an imprint of Bedbug Press in 2006; his most recent book, Wrestling Angels, by Ibbetson Street Press in 2011. He won the Robert Penn Warren First Award of New England Writers in 2003. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in several publications including Cape Codder, Concho River Review, Ibbetson Street. Jewish Currents, Lalitamba, The Larcom Review, Moment, The Oak, Passager, Senior Times, Ship of Fools, The Tusculum Review, and others. He and his wife Betty live in Newton, Mass.

Don Kimball

Coffee with the Poets — Saturday 8:30 AM

Don Kimball is the author of two chapbooks, Journal of a Flatlander (Finishing Line Press 2009) and Skipping Stones (Pudding House Publications 2008). His poetry has appeared in The Formalist, The Lyric, The Blue Unicorn, and various other journals and anthologies. Don currently hosts the monthly poetry reading series at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord, NH.

January Gill O’Neil

The Poetry of Rafael Campo and January O'Neil — Saturday 10:00 AM

January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (CavanKerry Press, December 2009), and a forthcoming collection, Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, fall 2014). She is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and an assistant professor of English at Salem State University. January's poems and articles have appeared in Ploughshares, Sou’Wester, North American Review, The MOM Egg, Crab Creek Review, Ouroboros Review, Drunken Boat, Crab Orchard Review, Callaloo, Literary Mama, Field, Seattle Review, and Cave Canem anthologies II and IV, among others. Underlife was a finalist for ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award, and the 2010 Paterson Poetry Prize. She was featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s January/February 2010 Inspiration issue as one of its 12 debut poets. Her poem, “Chocolate,” was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She is on the advisory board of the Mass Poetry, and on the planning committee for the 2013 AWP Boston Conference. A Cave Canem fellow, she runs a popular blog called Poet Mom (http://poetmom.blogspot.com/).

John M. Ridland

The Poetry of John Ridland and David Slavitt — Saturday 11:00 AM

John M. Ridland was born in London in 1933 of Scottish ancestry, but has lived most of his life in California. He taught writing and literature for over forty years in the English Department and the College of Creative Studies at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he still lives. Ridland’s published books include: Fires of Home, Ode on Violence, In the Shadowless Light, Elegy for My Aunt, Palms, Life with Unkie, (Un) Extinguished Lamo/Lampara Anapagada, and A Brahms Card Ballad which was published in Hungarian translation by the Europa Press three years before it was published by the Dowitcher Press in California. With his New Zealand-born wife Muriel, he wrote And Say What He Is: The Life of a Special Child, published in 1975 by the MIT Press. His latest book, Happy in an Ordinary Thing, is being released by the Truman State University Press. Visiting Hungary in 1987 he learned of Janos Vitez, a "folk epic" poem by Sandor Petofi which he later translated as John the Valiant, published first by the Corvina Press Budapest (1999), again by the Devi Foundation in Pecs (2001), and in 2004, in an edition still in print, by the Hesperus Press, London. With Peter Czipott he continues to translate work by the Hungarian poets Sandor Marai, whose Selected Poems are forthcoming from Alma Books in London, and Miklos Radnoti, whose A Gnarled Stick: Selected Poems is under consideration at the New American Press. Ridland has received a gold medal from the Arpad Society of Cleveland, Ohio, and the 2010 Balassi Sword Award for his Hungarian translations.

Jan Schreiber

Sparring with the Sun: Poets and the Ways We Think about Poetry
in the Late Days of Modernism – Saturday 3:00 PM

Jan Schreiber has published poems and critical essays in many journals, both print and on-line, over more than four decades. His poetic sequence, “Zeno’s Arrow,” was set to music for tenor and piano by Paul Alan Levi in 2001. His books include Digressions, Wily Apparitions, Bell Buoys, and two books of translations: A Stroke upon the Sea and Sketch of a Serpent. His most recent book, a collection of critical essays called Sparring with the Sun, is just out from Antilever Press. A founder of Canto: Review of the Arts and a co-founder of the annual Symposium on Poetry Criticism at Western State Colorado University, he is also a study group leader at Brandeis University’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, specializing in Renaissance and modern poetry.

David Slavitt

The Poetry of John Ridland and David Slavitt — Saturday 11:00 AM

Poet, novelist, critic, and translator David Slavitt was born in White Plains, New York. He attended Yale University for two years and was elected class poet in 1956. After leaving Yale, he began his writing career as a movie critic at Newsweek magazine. He has since authored more than 100 works of literature, in styles ranging from dramatic translations to pulp fiction. Despite the diversity of his literary endeavors, however, poetry remains his primary occupation. Like the rest of his work, Slavitt’s poetry is full of wit, though it balances satire with a sense of gravity. Notable collections of poetry include Dozens (1981) and PS3569.L3 (1998). Slavitt is the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for translation, an award for literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a Rockefeller Foundation artist’s residency. He currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Afaa Michael Weaver

The Poetry of Freddy Frankel and Afaa Michael Weaver — Saturday 1:00 PM

A native of Baltimore, Afaa Michael Weaver (born Michael S. Weaver) received his M.A. in writing (1987) from Brown University. He has been a Pew fellow, a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan, and an NEA fellow in poetry. His prizes include a Pushcart, the PDI Award in playwriting from ETA Theatre in Chicago, and the May Sarton Award. His tenth collection of poetry is The Plum Flower Dance (UPitt Press 2007). His eleventh collection of poems is Kama i’reeh (Like the Wind) (2010) a translation of his work into Arabic by Wissal Al-Allaq. Weaver works as an editor and translates contemporary Chinese poetry. At Simmons College, he holds an endowed chair as the Alumnae Professor of English. In early 2013 his 12th collection of poetry, The Government of Nature, will be published by U of Pittsburgh Press. His website is: www.afaamweaver.com. Photo by Catherine Laine.

Mimi White

The Poetry of Charles Coe and Mimi White — Saturday 2:00 PM

Mimi White, poet and teacher, has been working for more than twenty-five years with students of all ages to help them create original and authentic work, be it poetry, memoir or non fiction writing. She has worked in a variety of settings including schools, libraries, prisons, residencies for the elderly, and universities. She has been a member of the faculty at the University of New Hampshire, Northern Essex Community College, and Lesley University. Her poems have been published in dozens of journals. They include Poetry, Harvard Review, West Branch, The Seattle Review, The Worcester Review and Rivendell, FIELD (forthcoming) and 5 AM (forthcoming). Mimi is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Into The Darkness We Go and The Singed Horizon, which was selected by Robert Creeley as the recipient of the 2000 Philbrick Poetry Award. She has been a finalist and a recipient of a NH State Fellowship in Poetry. She was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire 2005-2007. Deerbrook Editions published her first full length book, The Last Island, in 2008. The Last Island was awarded the 2009 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Poetry. Her most recent publication, Memory Won’t Save Me a haibun, (Deerbrook Editions) was published in the fall of 2012.