Award-winning members of the Southcoast Poets will be reading at the Mattapoisett Free Public Library on Tuesday, April 30 at 6:30 pm. Vivian Eyre, Elizabeth Sylvia and Margot Wizansky will each be reading from their award-winning books and will be introduced by library director Susan Pizzolato, herself a member of the group.
Vivian Eyre’s recently published “Ishmael’s Violets” (Kelsay Press, 2023) depicts in lyric detail her concern for the plight of whales and sea. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including: Bellingham Review, J Journal, One Art, Pangyrus, Quiddity, Spire, SWIMM, The Fourth River, The Massachusetts Review, The Orchards Journal, The Santa Ana Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, Twelve Mile Journal, and others. She recently started a series, Poets in Conversation, in an art gallery at the Imago Foundation for the Arts, in Warren, Rhode Island, where she resides.
Elizabeth Sylvia’s debut book “None but Witches,” won the 3 Mile Harbor Book Prize in 2022. Her poems have been published in many journals including Chautauqua, Crab Creek, The Greensboro Review, Permafrost, Pleiades, RHINO, The Southern Review, Soundings East, Spoon River Poetry Review, and others. She is currently circulating a manuscript centered around Marie Antoinette, privilege, and climate change. She teaches English at Bourne High School and lives in Mattapoisett.
Margot Wizansky has recently published two books, “Wild for Life” (Lily Poetry Review) in 2022 and “The Yellow Sweater” (Kelsay Press) in 2023. She has poems in many literary journals such as The Missouri Review, Poetry East, Lumina, Inkwell, Quarterly West, Potomac Review, the American Literary Review, and others. She has edited two anthologies: “Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House,” and “Rough Places Plain: Poems of the Mountains.” In “Don’t Look Them in the Eye: Love, Life, and Jim Crow,” she transcribed the oral history of her friend, Emerson Stamps, whose parents were sharecroppers and grandparents were enslaved. Her original poems accompany his story. Margot lives in Mattapoisett, where she also paints, and in Brookline.
The books by these poets will be available for purchase and signing at the reception following the reading in the community room downstairs in the library, which is located at 7 Barstow Street in Mattapoisett. This event is part of the Purrington Lecture Series sponsored by the Mattapoisett Library Trust. Everyone is welcome to attend.