The Friends of the Mattapoisett Library’s annual Afternoon of Poetry will be held on Saturday, April 27, from 2:00 to 4:00 at the Mattapoisett Free Public Library. Guests this year are Grey Held, Alexis Ivy and Margot Wizansky.
Grey Held holds a BS from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MFA from Temple University. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first book, Two-Star General, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press. His second book, Spilled Milk, is being published by Word Press. His poem “Vending Machine” was set to music by Paul Carey and has been performed by a cappella groups all over the country. He has led poetry writing workshops for prisoners in the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord, has lectured in art and design at Ohio State University, and is currently director of client services at a research firm in Cambridge. He and his wife live in Newton, where they have raised two sons.
Alexis Ivy is a student of Literature at Harvard University’s Extension School and works at the family wallpaper business in the bookmaking department located on the South Shore. Her recent work has appeared in Spare Change News, The Dos Passos Review, Tar River Poetry, Licking River Review, J Journal, among others. Her first book entitled Romance with Small-Time Crooks has just been published by BlazeVox Books and is literally hot off the press.
Margot Wizansky is an artist, poet and social worker. She and her husband founded a business developing and managing households for adults with disabilities. Her poems have appeared in many journals such as Poetry East, Lumina, Tar River Poetry, and in several anthologies, including Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease. She has a poem forthcoming in the Cancer Poetry Project’s second anthology. She edited two anthologies: Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House, 2003, and Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains, 2006. In 2008, she won the Writers @ Work Poetry Fellowship competition, and in 2010, the Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize, to travel and write in Ireland with the Carlow University MFA program. She also transcribed an oral history: Don’t Look Them In The Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow, the story of Emerson Stamps, grandson of slaves, told in his prose and her poems.
Take some time to add some poetry to your life with the Friends. Books will be available for purchase and signing, and refreshments will be served.