Word Works Tribute to Lucille Clifton

At the June 6, 2011 Café Muse program featuring poets Martin Galvin and Rod Jellema, the Word Works will pay tribute to the late Lucille Clifton, a beloved poet and teacher in the national literary scene. Café Muse located at the Friendship Heights Village Center, 4433 South Park Avenue, Chevy Chase, MD begins at 7 pm.

Participating in the tribute are Jeffrey Coleman who will speak briefly about Ms. Clifton’s accomplishments and Donna Denize, who will read a Lucille Clifton poem.

The program is free and open to the public. More information at www.wordworksbooks.org.

(Photo courtesy of Karren L. Alenier)

Praise for Michele Wolf's Immersion

Michele Wolf is deeply amazed and grateful that her new collection, Immersion, was a poetry best-seller for distributor SPD Books in March, and that her new website, http://michelewolf.com, has received more than 1,200 unique visitors, including guests from Poland and Ghana. Of Immersion, Washington, D.C.’s examiner.comnoted, “Get immersed in Immersion…wonderful…very moving, very powerful….Every poem is delightfully unexpected, pulling the reader into the next poem.The poems are nicely crafted, tight with economy of words….Wolf has opened herself up to her readers, and provided them with a better sense of their own family belief system.” AARP the Magazine wrote, “‘Can you look at one face/For the whole of a life?/ Does the moon peer down/ At the tides and hunger for home?’ So asks…Michele Wolf, a poet of uncommon insight, inImmersion, her third collection. From family life to world events, her words will touch you.”

The gorgeous cover of Immersion--painting by Hellenne Vermillion, design by Susan Pearce--invariably draws attention. Wolf, who continues to teach at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, has a new blog post and three poems on the affecting site Poets on Adoption (http://poetsonadoption.blogspot.com/2011/05/michele-wolf.html). She wishes to fondly thank Nancy White, Karren Alenier, and Denise Duhamel for their support.

Barbara Louise Ungar is thrilled to have received another rave review from blogger Rabbit Reader, who discovered her work when the Amazon logarithm suggested he might like it; intrigued by the title, Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life (and no doubt by the excellent cover by Susan Pearce as well), and ended up selecting it to be on his Top Ten reads of 2011 list! He has since reviewed her two prior books, with another push for Charlotte, at http://rabbitreader.blogspot.com/2011/05/thrift-and-origin-of-milky-way-by.html, comparing Ungar not only to Margaret Atwood, but also James Joyce (she can die happy now).

Ungar was also surprised and delighted to see that Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life remained a Poetry Best Seller for Small Press Distribution in April for the second month in a row (http://www.spdbooks.org/pages/bestsellers/poetry/default.aspx), and is grateful to Nancy White for having gone to some trouble to get The Word Works books distributed by SPD.

AWP 2011

Word Works bought a booth #420 and here's what it looked like before we unloaded the boxes.

 

Here is the set up crew:

President Nancy White

Book Manager Brian Marx

Board Chairperson Karren Alenier

Brad Richard, 2010 Winner of the Washingotn Prize

Table after setup !!!

Participants in the Washington Prize Celebration Reading:

Back Row: Brad Richard, Jay Rogoff, Peter Blair

Front Row: Fred Marchant, Nathalie Anderson, Enid Shomer

All of our Washington Prize winners came from long distances, including Boston, Saratoga Springs, New Orleans, Florida, Philadelphia, South Carolina. This year travel was hard because of bad weather but we had a fabulous reading and crowd of about 60 people. Then we went out to dinner to continue the celebration! 

Come to Booth 420 on Saturday to meet them. AWP Bookfair is free & open to the public Feb 5. 

10 am - 4 pm.

Cafe Muse Pays Tribute to Hilary Tham January 3

In 2011, Cafe Muse will pay tribute to late poets the literary community hold dear.

Our Monday, January 3 program featuring poets Charles Jensen & Alexandra van de Kamp will honor Hilary Tham.


Friendship Heights Village Center, 
4433 South Park Avenue, 
Chevy Chase, MD 20815 
7:00 pm 


Here are biographic details for our feature readers and for Hilary Tham

CHARLES JENSEN was a finalist for the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for his book of poems The First Risk. He is the author of three additional chapbooks, including Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O'Hara Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in New England Review, The Journal, Willow Springs, and 32 Poems. A past recipient of a grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, he serves on the Board of Directors of the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County.

ALEXANDRA VAN DE KAMP is the author of three chapbooks, and the full-length collection, The Park of Upside-Down Chairs, (WordTech Press, 2010.) She is one of the founding editors of Terra Incognita, an international literary/cultural journal in English and Spanish. Her work appears widely in Meridian, Greensboro Review, Poetry Northwest and other publications. She lives in Port Jervis, NY and teaches at Stony Brook University.

HILARY THAM (1946-2005) was an artist and author of nine books of poetry, including Counting: A Long Poem. Her second book, Bad Names for Women, won second prize in the Virginia Poetry Prizes (Judge: Gerald Stern) and third prize in the Paterson Prize for Poetry (judge: Diane Wakoski). She also wrote a memoir: Lane With No Name, Memoirs and Poems of a Malaysian-Chinese Girlhood and a set of interlinked short stores Tin Mines & Concubines. A new project will make her books electronically available to libraries in 2011.

January's tribute to Ms. Tham is with grateful acknowledgment to the New Room Poets, a group organized by Hilary Tham. We also look forward to a reading of one of her poems by her husband Joe Goldberg who will kick off the open mic portion of the program.

Make a special effort to attend Cafe Muse

Monday November 15, 2010  7-9 pm

Friendship Heights Village Center

4433 South Park Avenue 

Chevy Chase, MD 20815

Featured are Barbara Goldberg and David Salner

GOURMAND’S PRAYER

Yellowtail snapper with citrus beurre blanc, filet
mignon in demi-glace cabernet, roast duck
garnished with mint-jellied peaches, angels
on horseback (dates stuffed with garlic cloves
wrapped in bacon and served in a hot honey-
pepper sauce), bananas foster, key lime pie,
dense, flourless chocolate cake drizzled
with a raspberry coulis, Lord, grant me the power
to well digest all that I have well eaten.

Barbara Goldberg
____
From The Royal Baker’s Daughter










SIX NAKED NIGHTS
The story of Julia and Jerome
is set in a nudist resort, all-inclusive, but
it's not about sex, or even love. It's about -
well, I should begin at the beginning,
the pool-side lounge. After the first drink,
Jerome goes back for a tray of Margaritas,
while Julia waits, thirsty to continue
the discussion about Jacksons
Browne and Pollack, Robespierre -
you know, let's-get-acquainted fare.

Their eyes have begun to develop
the habit of meeting each other in deep
stares that have some sexual content, surely,
the same as if they were wearing clothes.

Happy hour makes way for dinner,
Margaritas to red wine, after-dinner liquor,
and, "No thanks," to desert and coffee.
They pick their way through the darkness,
a little tipsy, and arrive at Julia's door
for an embarrassed moment, before
she says "come in" and uses a plastic card
attached to a lanyard, to unlock her room.
All of the guests wear plastic cards
swaying from their necks and nothing else.
She turns on the light before pulling the lanyard
up over her head and tossing it on a chair
as if it were her last undergarment. She offers Jerome
the other chair and stands before him, opening
a book of poems she has written, published
by a small but respectable firm. He sighs
as the words draw him into a world
of invention, where no one wears clothes
or dies.


David Salner












David Salner is author of John Henry's Partner Speaks.

Cafe Muse Live with Luis Alberto Ambroggio & Idra Novey

Cafe Muse had an evening of poetry in English, Spanish and Portuguese. Luis Alberto Ambroggio writes his poetry in Spanish. For this reading, he had help from Raquel Dunning, Adele Steiner, and Yvette Moreno-Neisser who read English translations of Senor Ambroggio's poems.

Idra Novey who writes in English and read some of her poems, also presented some poems by Paulo Henriques Britto in Portuguese and her translations of these poems.

The next Cafe Muse program on November 15, 2010 (please take careful note of the date) will feature poets Barbara Goldberg, author of The Royal Baker’s Daughter, and David Salner, author of John Henry’s Partner Speaks .

More information at WordWorksBooks.org.