Cheryl A. Rice’s work has appeared in Baltimore Review, Florida Review, Home Planet News, Mangrove, The Temple, and Woodstock Times, among others. Chapbooks include Llama Love (2017: Flying Monkey Press), Moses Parts the Tulips (2013: APD Press), and My Minnesota Boyhood (2012: Post Traumatic Press). Rice is founder and host of the now-defunct “Sylvia Plath Bake-Off.” Her RANDOM WRITING workshops are held throughout the Hudson Valley. Her poetry blog is at: http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com/.
Titles: My Minnesota Boyhood, Until the Words Came
Leslie Gerber was born in Brooklyn in 1943. He was graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in creative writing. For 39 years he ran a mail-order classical music business, while writing thousands of music reviews and articles. In 1970 he moved to Ulster County and has lived there ever since. He began writing poetry in 1999. He is a proud member of the Goat Hill Poets, founded by Cheryl A. Rice and himself. He lives in Woodstock New York with his dog Winnie. Website: www.lesliegerber.net
Titles: Lies of The Poets, The Edge of Sleep, Losing Tara
Guy Reed is a graduate of The American Academy of Dramatic Arts and author of the poetry chapbook, The Effort To Hold Light (Finishing Line Press). Most recently, he published and read two lyrical prose pieces on the podcast, The Strange Recital. He’s published poems in Poetry East and contributed two poems, performing one, in a featured role for the independent feature film, I Dream Too Much (2015, The Orchard), available on Netflix. In 2018, he co-wrote and directed the short film, How The World Looks Now, about poetic perspective as after-effect of the Earthrise photo and the Apollo astronauts’ experiences in space. Guy has lived in Minnesota, California, and Oregon. He now resides in New York’s Catskill Mountains with his wife and their two children.
Title: Until the Words Came
T. G. Vanini’s performances and recordings on vocals, violin, and piano include his own songs and songpoetry with The Princes of Serendip. Their most recent recording is Seed-Maid: Sentimental Songs (Jaiya Records). All the while he has pursued an active career as a mathematician in the form of one of his alter egos, Laurence Kirby, a Professor of Mathematics at Baruch College of the City University of New York, and a specialist in mathematical logic. T. G. Vanini provided electronic music for the soundtrack of Professor Kirby’s short documentary film Plimpton 322: The Ancient Roots of Modern Mathematics. An Englishman born in Hong Kong, T. G. Vanini lives in Woodstock, New York. This is his first book.
Gretchen Primack is as a poet, essayist, and writing instructor. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, FIELD, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals. She’s the author of another poetry collection, Doris’ Red Spaces (Mayapple 2014), and a chapbook, The Slow Creaking of Planets (Finishing Line 2007). Primack has worked as a union organizer, working women’s advocate, and a professor and administrator for a college program in a maximum-secfurity men’s prison. A passionate advocate for non-human animals as well, she co-wrote The Lucky Ones: My Passionate Fight for Farm Animals (Penguin Avery 2012) with Jenny Brown. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her beloved dogs, cats, and a human named Gus. Her Web site is www.gretchenprimack.com.
Titles: Kind
Jay Wenk (1927 – 2018) was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He studied music composition at Juilliard, psychotherapy at the Adler Institute, stage design at the Dramatic Workshop at the New School; all in Manhattan, and became a cabinet maker with the skills he learned at East New York Vocational High School. He founded a free Community Emotional Health facility in Woodstock, New York that became a base for the present, ongoing “Family” of Woodstock. He competed nationally as a bicyclist in the Senior Olympics and has pedaled from Los Angeles to Boston. Jay was a combat infantry veteran, WW2 in Europe and is one of the founders of Veterans for Peace. He lived in the home he built by hand in Woodstock New York, and served as a Councilman on the Woodstock Town Board for four terms. He co-authored The Catskills, a Bicycling Guide, Purple Mountain Press (1999) and authored STUDY WAR NO MORE – A Jewish Kid from Brooklyn Fights the Nazis, (2010).
Title: Thank You for Your Service
New York poet Lisa Mullenneaux has published the chapbook “Painters and Poets” (2012) and maintains the ekphrastic art gallery paintersandpoets.com. Her poems and literary criticism have appeared in the New England Review of Books, American Arts Quarterly, Stone Canoe, and World Literature Today. She is currently translating the poems of the Milanese poet Anna Maria Carpi. When she’s not writing, she teaches writing for the University of Maryland UC. Photo by: Mick Cantarella.
Titles: Keep Talking to Her, Private
Judith Kerman has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Galvanic Response (March Street Press) and Plane Surfaces/Plano de Incidencia (CCLEH), as well as three books of translations of Cuban and Dominican women writers (White Pine Press, BOA Editions, Mayapple Press). She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic in 2002. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in Buffalo, NY (1971 to present) and runs Mayapple Press, located in Woodstock, NY. A literary trailer of her poem, “Fragile,” and her video documentary about Dominican Carnaval, as well as clips of several readings, can be seen on YouTube on the Judith Kerman channel.Visit her website at https://judithkerman.wordpress.com. Photo by Franco Vogt.
Title: Postcards from America
Alison Koffler’s poems often arise from where the human world and the wilderness intersect. She was the recipient of the Poetry Teacher of the Year Award from Poets’ House and McGraw-Hill in 2003, and the Green Heron Poetry Award in 2011. She is the 2016 winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Award for poetry, having won it as well as in 1993, 2000, and 2006. Her poems have appeared in such publications as Iris: A Journal for Women, Heliotrope, and Home Planet News, and were included in the anthologies lifeblood: the woodstock poetry society anthology, Chickaree Press, 2011 and A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, SUNY Press, 2013. A retired educator, she works part-time for the New York City Writing Project at Lehman College. Alison lives in the Bronx and Woodstock, NY with her husband, the poet Dayl Wise and their dog, Cole, and is the co-founder of Post Traumatic Press. Photo by Valerie Samuels.
Titles: The Others, Animal Trance
James Johnston Clarke (1934 - 2018) was an elderly Presbyterian whose idea of a good time is to sulk. His interests include barratry and mounting moths. He was born in 1934 in Pollard Mills, Kentucky and he will neither use shower time for atonement nor do windows. He is not in harmony with anything plastic and was a full-time faculty of Ulster Community College in Stone Ridge for 25 years. He has been a soldier, a father and a fisherman.
Title: The Crow of the Moon
Teresa Costa (sometimes referred to as Teresa Marta Costa) is a diehard poet dedicated to promoting poetry throughout the Hudson Valley. She has hosted the Woodstock Goddess Festival (2012 and 2013) and poetry readings in Saugerties, Woodstock, and Kingston, NY since 2002. She currently runs the Word of Mouth Poetry series at the ArtBar in Kingston, NY. Costa has been published in Wildflowers: a Woodstock Anthology (Shivastan Press), Other #6, Stained Sheets, Chronogram, Home Planet News, Up the River, Riverine (Codhill Press), Companions (Crazy Ladies Press), Walt’s Corner, Long Island Quarterly, HeyDay Magazine, among many others. She has lectured at Northeast College of Poetry on the Beat Poets and has done a workshop at the Seligman Center in Sugarloaf, NY on the Jazz Poets.
Title: Creature Comforts
Amanda Nicole Gulla is an assistant professor of English education at Lehman College, CUNY. She is a winner of the In Our Own Write Poetry Award and has presented her poetry at Dixon Place and other venues. She lives and works in New York City and the Catskills.
Title: A Banner Year for Apples
Susan Hoover is a poet and teaching artist who has been a featured reader at such venues as The New School, the Knitting Factory and the Cornelia Street Café in New York City. She has also performed regionally at several Woodstock Poetry Festivals, the Colony Arts Center, and the Woodstock Artists Association. Susan was a member of All Right! Girls, a poetry performance group, with Nancy Rullo and Janice King. Her poems have been published in Isinglass Review, Cold Mountain Review, Cover Arts New York, University of Colorado Literary Magazine, EPT, Dark Thirty, Home Planet News, Chronogram, and Granite. Her books include The Magnet and the Target (The New School Chapbook Series, 1995) and Taxi Dancer (Exotic Beauties Press, 1979). Her poems have been anthologized in lifeblood: woodstock poetry society anthology (Chickaree Press, 2011) and As If the World Had Not Known Sorrow (The Poets Press, 1986). A singer songwriter and guitarist, she taught guitar at the Mannes College of Music and the Guitar Study Center in New York City. Born in Montreal, Susan grew up in Williamstown, MA, and lived for many years in New York City’s West Village. She now resides with her two cats, James Joyce and Tiger Magritte, in Woodstock, NY.
Sharon Israel, poet and soprano, has a BA from Brooklyn College and a MS from the New School of Social Research. She was an early recipient of Brooklyn College’s Leonard Hecht Poetry Explication Award, and her work most recently appeared in Per Contra, SPANK THE CARP, 5:2, Crime Poetry Weekly, Medical Literary Messenger, and Spry Literary Journal. Sharon was a local news reporter, feature writer and music critic for Courier-Life publications, Women’s eNews and for the late, lamented Brooklyn Phoenix. She has worked as a shoe saleswoman, microbiology lab technician, secretary, had a short stint as a municipal bond salesperson right before the crash of 1987, and worked over two decades as a grant writer and development director. Sharon collaborates with composer Robert Cucinotta on works for voice, live instruments and electronics and has premiered several of his works in New York. She hosts the radio program, Planet Poet—Words in Space, an edition of The Writer’s Voice, on WIOX FM, in Roxbury, NY. Photo by Christopher Durham.
Title: Voice Lesson
Mike Jurkovic’s poems and music criticism have appeared everywhere but generate no reportable income. Mike is the author of the poetry collection, Purgatory Road (Pudding House Press, 2010) and his work has appeared in the anthologies WaterWrites and Riverine (Codhill Press, 2009, 2007), and Will Work for Peace (Zeropanik, 1999). He is currently the co-director of Calling All Poets in New Paltz, NY and producer of CAPSCAST, live readings from the Calling All Poets Series available on www.callingallpoets.net and iTunes. His CD reviews and regional music features appear in Elmore Magazine, Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange and the Van Wyck Gazette. He loves Emily most of all. www.mikejurkovic.com
Titles: Eve's Venom
Thomas Brinson served in II Corps Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, including surviving the Tet Offensive, and as a Peacemaker with the Nonviolent Peace Force in Mutur, Trincomalee, Sri Lanka from 2003 to 2005, surviving the December 26, 2004 tsunami. He’s been a veteran activist for over 40 years as a member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Vietnam Veterans of America and Veterans for Peace since he returned from service in Vietnam, landing in Washington DC’s National Airport about three hours after Martin Luther King had been assassinated. With colleague Vince Treanor, he did research, publishing and training on the correlation of addiction with PTSD in combat veterans. Retired on a 100% disability for PTSD, he lives with his wife Jill and two cats.
Title: Love and War
Will Nixon’s other poetry books are My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse (Foothills), Love in the City of Grudges (Foothills), Acrostic Woodstock (Bushwhack), and chapbooks: When I Had It Made (Pudding House) and The Fish Are Laughing (Pavement Saw). He’s the co-author with Michael Perkins of Walking Woodstock: Journeys into the Wild Heart of America’s Most Famous Small Town (Bushwhack) and The Pocket Guide to Woodstock (Bushwhack). His website is willnixon.com.
Title: My Clone
Walt Nygard is the Vice President of Veterans for Peace, Northern New Jersey Chapter 021. He is a USMC veteran of Vietnam, Okinawa, and the Philippines, 1969 – 1970. He was born in Portland, Oregon, and raised on US Army posts of the American West and Germany. Walt is a blue collar writer of poetry and fiction. He is involved as a graphic artist with Combat Paper. His son is a US Army veteran with service in the war in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division.
Titles: The Summer Joe Joined the Army
Dayl Wise was drafted into the US Army in 1969 with service in Viet Nam and Cambodia, 1970 and returned in 1993 in the form of reconciliation delivering medical supplies. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, and is the author of Poems and other stuff (PTP, 2004) and Basic Load (PTP, 2009). Currently Dayl lives in the Bronx and Woodstock, New York with his wife, the poet Alison Koffler, and is co-founder of (PTP) Post Traumatic Press. Photo by Adam Holstein.
Titles: Basic Load
Joe Bellacero is a lifelong teacher who writes with his students, among whose many accomplishments was being the Associate Director for the New York City Writing Project. “People are too dear, too complex, and too strange for prose alone, so I write poetry.”
Title: Now This is the Strange Part
Michael Gillen entered the Merchant Marine in 1967, with Vietnam service in 1969. He teaches Asian History for Pace University in Pleasantville, NY and a course on the Vietnam War at Purchase College, State University of NY. He is an active member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace. He lives with his wife, Fern, and their cats.
Title: Wild Geese Returning