2007 Poetry Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Simone Beaubien

Young Adult Poetry Slam - Saturday 4:00 PM

Simone Beaubien makes her home in suburban Massachusetts, working as an EMT and volunteering for the local ultimate disco league. She is proud to co-host the open mic and slam every Wednesday night at the world-famous Cantab Lounge in Boston.

Simone’s poetry runs the gamut from sonnets to slam, including themes from feminism to the laws of physics (sometimes in the same poem). She was lucky enough to compete in the 2001 National Poetry Slam as a member of the 2001 Boston/Cantab Slam Team, and received the 2002 Best Performance Poet (female) award from the Boston Poetry Awards. Currently, she is a member of Boston’s Off-Broadway Poetry Troupe and the 2004 Boston/Cantab Slam Team.

David Berman

Green Eggs and Ham: Breakfast with the Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

David Berman, a noted attorney, is a graduate of the University of Florida, where he studied with Elliott Coleman. He earned graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins University and Boston University, where he studied with Robert Lowell. While attending Harvard Law School he studied with Archibald MacLeish and published work frequently in the Harvard Advocate.

Berman's work has also appeared in numerous magazines, including Counter Measures, The Formalist, Harvard Magazine, Piedmont Literary Review, The Epigrammatist, Sparrow, Iambs & Trochees, and Orbis. He has also published three chapbooks: "Future Imperfect" (State Street Press, 1982), "Slippage" (Robert L. Barth, 1996), and "David Berman: Greatest Hits 1965-2002" (Pudding House, 2002).

His awards and honors include several from Dr. Alfred Dorn's World Order of Narrative & Formalist Poets, which sponsors a yearly national competition. In 1999, David Berman adjudicated the Newburyport Art Association Annual Poetry Contest.

Pat Callan

Poetry à la Carte - Saturday 11:30 AM
Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM

Patricia Callan is a playwright and poet living in Massachusetts and Florida. Her play, Papa’s House, won the Loren Taylor Memorial Playwriting Contest. Her poetry has been published in Voices, Sea Sands, Candelabrum, and other periodicals. She is vice-president of Fabulous African Fabrics, an organization that helps women and children fighting AIDS in Kenya.

Michael Cantor

Poetry à la Carte - Saturday 11:30 AM
Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM

Michael Cantor won the 2004 Newburyport Art Association Poetry Competition. His work has appeared, or is awaiting publication, in Measure, The Formalist, Dark Horse, Iambs & Trochees, Texas Poetry Journal, The Atlanta Review, The Cumberland Poetry Review (Robert Penn Warren Award finalist), The Comstock Review (Pushcart Prize nomination), and many other journals, anthologies, and e-zines. Born in New York, he has lived and worked in Japan, Europe, and Latin America, and now resides on Plum Island, surrounded by far too many books, woks, and condiments.

Bill Coyle

Hot Off the Press: New Books by Powow River Poets - Saturday 10:00 AM
Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

Bill Coyle's poems and translations have appeared in The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, The New Republic, Poetry, and PN Review. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and teaches at Salem State College. His first collection of poems, winner of the 2005 New Criterion Poetry Prize, is due for publication later this year.

Robert Crawford

Hot Off the Press: New Books by Powow River Poets - Saturday 10:00 AM

Robert Crawford lives in Chester, New Hampshire. He is an assistant professor at Chester College of New England, where he teaches poetry and is the director of information technologies. His poems have won numerous national awards and have appeared in The Formalist, First Things, The Dark Horse, Pivot, The Comstock Review, The Lyric, Light, and other journals. His first book of poetry, Too Much Explanation Can Ruin a Man, was published by David Robert Books in 2005.

Rhina P. Espaillat

Green Eggs and Ham: Breakfast with the Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
Hot Off the Press: New Books by Powow River Poets - Saturday 10:00 AM
Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM
Black, White & Blues - Saturday 7:00 PM

Rhina P. Espaillat was born in the Dominican Republic in 1932, has lived in the United States since 1939, and writes poetry and prose both in English and in her native Spanish. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The Lyric, Poetry, Sparrow, Orbis, The Formalist, and The American Scholar, as well as some forty anthologies.

Espaillat has eight poetry collections in print, including Where Horizons Go, which won the 1998 T. S. Eliot Prize; Rehearsing Absence, which won the 2001 Richard Wilbur Award; and most recently, Playing at Stillness. In 2004 she became the first winner of the Tree at My Window Award from the Robert Frost Foundation for her Spanish translations of Robert Frost and her English translations of Saint John of the Cross and César Sánchez Beras. That same year she also received the Dominican Republic's Salome Ureña de Henríquez Award for service to Dominican culture and education.

Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her husband Alfred Moskowitz, a sculptor. She coordinates the Newburyport Art Association's Annual Poetry Contest, directs the Powow River Poets, which she co-founded, and organizes that group's monthly reading series.

Midge Goldberg

Green Eggs and Ham: Breakfast with the Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
Hot Off the Press: New Books by Powow River Poets - Saturday 10:00 AM

Midge Goldberg has been writing poetry for six years. Her work has been published in such journals as Dogwood, Measure, Atlanta Review, the European Romantic Poetry Anthology, and the Powow River Anthology, among others. She won an honorable mention in the 2005 Robert Frost Poetry contest, third place in the 2004 Newburyport Art Association Poetry contest, and was the recipient of the 2005 Dick Shea Memorial Poetry Prize from the University of New Hampshire. She is a member of the Powow River Poets.

A. M. Juster

Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM
Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

A. M. Juster is the author of a book of Petrarch translations, Longing for Laura (Birch Brook Press, 2001) and a book of original poetry, The Secret Language of Women (University of Evansville Press, 2003), which Rachel Hadas selected as the winner of the Richard Wilbur Award. He is a two-time winner of The Formalist's Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award and other honors. Juster's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Carolina Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and many other publications. He has been a featured poet in Light Quarterly and a fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Len Krisak

Green Eggs and Ham: Breakfast with the Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
Hot Off the Press: New Books by Powow River Poets - Saturday 10:00 AM
Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

Len Krisak has taught at Brandeis, Northeastern University, and Stonehill College.  His two chapbooks, “Midland” and “Fugitive Child,” were published in 1999 by Somers Rocks Press and Aralia Press, respectively. In 2000, his full-length collection Even as We Speak won the Richard Wilbur Prize and was published by the University of Evansville Press. In 2004, If Anything appeared from WordTech Editions, and in 2006, Carcanet published his Complete Odes of Horace.

Krisak’s work has appeared over the years in The Sewanee Review, Agenda, Commonweal, The Hudson Review, PN Review, The Formalist, The National Review, Margie, The Cumberland Poetry Review, Tennessee Quarterly, Classical Outlook, Pivot, Rattapallax, The Weekly Standard, and The Oxford Book of Poems on Classical Mythology, among many others.

He is a recipient of the Robert Penn Warren and Robert Frost Prizes, along with numerous awards from the New England Poetry Club, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, and more than 50 other organizations.

Sydney Lea

Talking Blues: Sydney Lea Reads - Saturday 2:30 PM

Sydney Lea, founder and for thirteen years editor of New England Review, has published a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of nonfiction, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness. Ghost Pain: Poems is his eighth volume of poems. Its predecessor, Pursuit of a Wound, was a Pulitzer finalist, and his To the Bone: New and Selected Poems was co-winner of the Poets' Prize. Recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, Lea has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, the Vermont College MFA program, Eotvos Lorand University (Budapest), and Franklin College (Lugano, Switzerland). He lives in Vermont with his wife, attorney and mediator Robin Barone, and children. He currently teaches at Dartmouth College.

Juan Matos

Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

Juan Matos, born in the Dominican Republic in 1956, has a degree in chemistry from the University of Santo Domingo, a masters in education from Lehman College (CUNY), and another in bilingual education from Worcester State College. He has done graduate work at the University of Madrid and the University of Alcala, Spain. Matos teaches in Worcester, where he belongs to various educational and cultural organizations, including the Hostos Cultural Group. He is a co-founder of PEC (Palabra, Expresion Cultural) in New York City, and of Tertulia Pedro Mir, an active and successful poetry-reading series in Lawrence, MA. His numerous Spanish-language collections include Crecer; Amor de noche y mar; De las parras; De mi desidia; Con pecado concebido; Temblor de espejos; Azucar, cayo y puerto; and Del milagro de la espera.

Mildred J. Nash

Green Eggs and Ham: Breakfast with the Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM

Mildred J. Nash received her master’s degree from Harvard, where she studied with Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell and Robert Fitzgerald. Recently retired from the Burlington, Massachusetts, school system, where she headed Marshall Simonds Middle School’s gifted and talented program, Nash is the author of Beyond Their Dreams (Pocahontas Press, 1989). Her poems have also appeared in The Formalist, Iambs & Trochees, The California Quarterly and Light, among others, and she has had numerous awards from the World Order of Narrative Poets, as well as from the Poetry Society of America and the New England Poetry Club.

Karen Nelson

Green Eggs and Ham: Breakfast with the Poets - Saturday 8:00 AM
Poetry à la Carte - Saturday 11:30 AM

Karen Nelson, a Californian who recently moved to New England, has read her poetry from Santa Monica to Greenwich Village and at venues including the Portsmouth Press Room. She has been a featured reader with the Powow River Poets in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and at the Portsmouth Poetry Hoot in New Hampshire. While residing in California's Anza Borrego Desert State Park, her work took on the color and radiance of her exquisite home: “Nothing can stop the light's revelation.”

Nelson rocks the rocky shores of New England with her vivid, rollicking Southwestern sensuality. Her poems reveal the beauty of the body and the intense joys of its pleasure. They also show us beauty in restraint and objectivity. Her artist’s eye contributes to the strength of her imagery in word paintings that stay in our minds long after we've closed the book.

Alfred Nicol

Poetry à la Carte - Saturday 11:30 AM
Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM

Alfred Nicol is editor of the Powow River Anthology. In 2004, he was the recipient of the Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light (University of Evansville Press). His poems have been anthologized in Contemporary Poetry of New England and in Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets, and have appeared in Poetry, Commonweal, The New England Review, The Formalist, Measure, and many other journals. A serialization of his long poem, “Persnickety Ichabod’s Rhyming Diary” appears in Light.

Ben Pickard

Whittier as a Local Poet - Saturday 1:00 PM
Whittier and His Elizabeths - Sunday 2:00 PM

Ben Pickard, a former Professor of English at the University of Florida, taught there for thirty-three years before he retired in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. from Wisconsin and taught at the University of California and Rice University before coming to Florida. His special interest has always been in American Literature and he has published or edited thirteen books, mainly on nineteenth-century authors like John Greenleaf Whittier and Emily Dickinson. He has also been active in the teaching of film and served as a movie columnist for the Gainesville Sun. He helped found a preservation society, Historic Gainesville, Inc., served as its president, and published three books on local history for that organization; one of them, Florida's Eden: An Illustrated History of Alachua County, was the first comprehensive history of the county. In addition he has served as president of the Alachua County Historical Society, helped found the Matheson Historical Center, and then wrote histories of both societies. In 1999 he organized the Alachua Press, Inc., served as its first president until 2004, and oversaw its publishing of eight books on local history.

Jodie Reyes

Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

José Edmundo Ocampo Reyes was born and raised in the Philippines, and holds degrees from Ateneo de Manila and Columbia Universities. His poems and translations have appeared in such journals as Circumference: Poetry in Translation, The Hudson Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Philippine Studies, Ploughshares, and Rattle; and have been featured on Poetry Daily. His poems also appear in two editions of The Likhaan Book of Poetry and Fiction, the Philippine analogue of The Best American Poetry and The Best American Stories, as well as in the anthologies Father Poems (Anvil Publishing, 2004) and The Powow River Anthology (Ocean Publishing, 2006). A former fellow at the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City, Philippines, he is a recipient of the Der-Hovanessian Translation Prize from the New England Poetry Club.

César Sánchez Beras

Representations - Saturday 3:30 PM

César Sánchez Beras was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in 1962. He earned his doctor of laws degree at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo in 1988. He has published numerous poetry collections in Spanish, including most recently Dias de Carne (2005), and two bilingual volumes: Trovas del Mar/Troves of the Sea (2002) and El Sapito Azul/The Little Blue Frog (2004). Winner of numerous awards for his writing and teaching, Mr. Sanchez currently teaches Spanish and literature at Lawrence High School. He has also been a cultural activist and journalist for various Massachusetts newspapers and magazines. From 1996 to 2000, he held the honorary post of cultural adviser to the Dominican Consulate in Boston. For several years he has been involved in an annual two-day exchange of students between the creative writing groups of Newburyport High School and Lawrence High School.

Stephen Scaer

Poetry à la Carte - Saturday 11:30 AM
Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM

Stephen Scaer has had poems published in Light, Measure, Iambs & Trochees, The Formalist and First Things.  He has won several poetry contests including The New England Shakespeare Festival Sonnet Contest and has twice been a finalist for the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award.  He is dean of Pelham High School’s Special Education Department.

Toni Treadway

Poetry à la Carte - Saturday 11:30 AM
Light Heavyweights: A Reading of Light Verse - Saturday 1:00 PM

As a girl, Toni Treadway climbed to the highest branch in a tree to watch the birds soar and hear her own thoughts. She took a road in the arts working with independent filmmakers and in those decades,  wrote about film. Alongside Bob Brodsky, she became an advocate for moving images made by amateur filmmakers and artists. She champions small gauge films as cultural documents, the movie equivalent to letters, diaries and poems.  Lately, encouraged by the productive models in the Powow River Poets, she's writing, singing and courting the old love of sound again.