Inside Poetry: Readings and Conversation with Six Poets

Join us for an afternoon of poetry reading and discussion with six poets at varying stages of their craft.

Members of a poetry workshop run by the poet Elaine Sexton, this group meets weekly on Zoom to share and hone their writing.  Over time they have grown to know each other very well via the poems they bring to class, as well as all the commentaries and critiques.  They cheer each other on as poets and otherwise.  They make a great effort to see one another in person, too, whenever possible; this is happily one of those times.

The poets you’ll hear from are:

Bonnie Jill Emanuel, reading from Glitter City

Thea Goodman, reading from The Invented Mother

Linda Hillman Chayes, reading from Not My First Walk On The Moon

Vanessa Smith, reading from Room Tone

Michele Karas, reading from current work

Sherry Stuart Berman, reading from current work

Whether you are an aspiring poet yourself or poetry is simply a cherished part of your life, we hope you’ll spend your Friday afternoon with us. Please let us know if you’ll be coming by (for planning purposes). Books will be available for purchase and signing.

About the Poets

Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City, which released earlier this year.  Poems in this collection were nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best-Of-The-Net, and first appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and more.  Emanuel is the recipient of the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize from The City College of New York.

Like glitter - tiny, precision-cut, reflective particles - the poems in Glitter City shine by reflection with flashes of light. Narrative, cinematic, and often trance-like, the poems trace their way back in time. From Fulton Street, Brooklyn to Detroit's Woodward Avenue, over city scaffolds and rural fields, across graveyards and weedy highways, Emanuel's debut collection grieves and loves, glittering fiercely.

Thea Goodman, author of The Invented Mother  Finishing Line Press, 2023, a finalist in  The New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition 2022, is a poet, novelist and educator in Chicago and the co-chair of the National Council of Graywolf Press. Her novel, The Sunshine When She’s Gone (Henry Holt) appeared in 2013 to critical acclaim and her short works have been published in New England Review, Arrowsmith, Columbia, among many others and received a Pushcart Prize Special mention and the Columbia Fiction Award.

The poems in The Invented Mother question the social construction and the reality of mothering, the gender binary, and the mystery of family relationships on a changing planet.

Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of the poetry chapbooks Not My First Walk On The Moon and The Lapse, both published by Finishing Line Press. She also co-wrote and co-edited The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity. She practices as a psychologist/psychoanalyst in NYC and Westchester.

Not My First Walk On The Moon takes the reader on a journey through time and geographies. It moves through seasons and generations, through cityscapes, seashore, barrier islands, and backyards. The poems reflect on loss and how it reverberates throughout a lifetime including the tiny but continual losses of aging. Many of the poems use a framework of visual art and imagery—including a mother’s love of Turner’s “Paintings of the Sea at Margate,” a crime scene photo in which the facts fail to tell the story, and a portrait of a family leaving Rockaway beach in late afternoon.

Poet Vanessa Hedwig Smith, author of Room Tone, Finishing Line Press, is also a painter and filmmaker.  She has lived and worked in India, Nepal, England, and the United States, and is most proud of a BBC Correspondent piece she produced which was instrumental in helping to free a teenage girl from prison, which helped changed Nepalese law, and which won the Amnesty International Media 2000 Award. In addition, Smith is a co-founder of the mental health series Let’s Talk. 

Room Tone invites the reader to explore perception, love, and impermanence as it delves into the landscape of the human experience.  A meditative and imaginative voice underscores these poems that are startling portraits from a woman’s life - including scenes from childhood, marriage, motherhood, travel, illness, divorce, and the deaths of those around her.

Michele Karas is a New York-based writer with roots in San Diego.  Her poems can be read widely online and in print.  Michele holds an MFA from The City College of New York where she was a recipient of The Jerome Lowell DeJur Award for Creative Writing.

Sherry Stuart Berman’s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies such as SWWIM, Guesthouse, The Night Heron Barks, 2 Horatio, Paterson Literary Review, and Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai.  She is a psychotherapist and lives in Staten Island, NY, with her husband and son.