Featured poets are Dr. Joyce Ash and Patrick Donnelly (Patrick was originally scheduled in March 2020 but was postponed due to COVID).

Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang (a.k.a. Joyce Ash) is a poet and Professor of English at the University of Hartford, Connecticut. Born in Cameroon, Central Africa, she is the author of many scholarly and creative publications, which include four poetry collections, Their Champagne Party Will End: Poems in Honor of Bate Besong, co-edited (2008), A Basket of Flaming Ashes (2010), Beautiful Fire (2018), and Bearing Witness: Poems from a Land in Turmoil, co-edited (2020). She has appeared as an invited poet in many countries including England, Germany, Nicaragua, Greece, Costa Rica, Colombia, Bangladesh, Cameroon, and USA. She has also contributed to several international poetry anthologies including, Peace for Afrin, Peace for Kurdistan (2019), Hiraeth-Erzolirzoli: A Wales – Cameroon Anthology (2018), Poems for the Hazara (2014), Reflections: An Anthology of New Work by African Women Poets (2013), and We Have Crossed Many Rivers: New Poetry from Africa (2012). Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Bangla, Arabic, and Romanian. Her collection Beautiful Fire won the 2020 African Literature Association Book of the Year Award-Creative Writing. She also received the Kathrak-Bangladesh Literary Award (2018). For more on Dr. Joyce Ashuntantang, visit her website www.joyceash.com.

Patrick Donnelly is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Little-Known Operas (Four Way Books, 2019). Gregory Orr has written that “everything he writes is suffused with tenderness and intelligence, lucidity and courage.” Donnelly is director of the Poetry Seminar at The Frost Place, Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH, now a center for poetry and the arts. With his spouse Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly translates classical Japanese poetry and drama. Their translations in The Wind from Vulture Peak (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) were awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Donnelly’s other awards include a U.S./Japan Creative Artists Program Award, an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award. Donnelly was 2015 – 2017 poet laureate of Northampton, MA.

Open Mic follows the featured poets. Sign up during registration or email Tom (below).

Upon registering your email for this program, you will receive the Zoom link to join. All participants will start with video off and sound muted. No computer/internet at home? Call the Library for the phone number, meeting ID & password and join us over the phone.