First Fridays
September 3rd-Dan Solis and Jim Warner
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Click on the link below to hear interviews with the poets and excerpts from First Fridays.
To celebrate our fifth year of bringing the best new voices on page and stage to our little river town, First Fridays Contemporary Writers Series has received a brand new Fender PA system which can patch into a laptop so we can record and archive the First Fridays readings. We hope to post shortened recordings after the reading on our library website www.wsplonline.org. This year, we are looking for a volunteer to help us record live and archive. First Fridays is also looking to improve our lighting. We are hoping for a donation or loan of two light trees with two fresnels for the season which ends in December 2010.
Also, in celebration of our fifth year as well as being chosen as a Picturing America library by the National Endowment for the Humanities, First Fridays will offer an "ekphrastic" component to our readings. An "ekphrastic" poem is one that is inspired by art work. Each month at First Firdays, we will hang an image from the Picturing America collection. The collection includes art in all forms from the year 1000AD to the present by American artists: pottery by the Anasazi, paintings Andrew Wyeth, Marie Cassatt, John James Audubon, Black Hawk, and Jacob Lawrence, photography by Dorothea Lange, and architecture by Thomas Cole and Frank Lloyd Wright, plus many other images. Both the audience and the visiting author will be encouraged to write and read new poems inspired by the image of the month.
Western Sullivan Public Library's Jeffersonville branch will also offer a new program in conjunction with the Picturing America collection. FindArt: Family Art Project will meet two Saturdays a month starting in April. The workshop centers on various art images some of which are from the Picturing America collection. Artist educator from the Museum of Modern Art, Kirstin Broussard will introduce art forms, images, and materials to local families who will then create art inspired by those images. FindArt is free and open to the public. It is a family oriented program and intergenerational families are encouraged to register as a group. Limit: 20 individuals. Pre-registration is required for each project. Our hopes are that in January 2011, we will hold a gallery opening that showcases the First Fridays poems, the FindArt projects, and the images from Picturing America.
Upcoming visiting authors include:
September 3 :
Dan Solis, Albuqerque, NM http://www.nmculturenet.org/poetry/poets-in-the-schools/bios/
Jim Warner, Wilkes-Barre, PA http://ecdcweekly.com/features/story.asp?id=43810
October 4 :
Marty McConnell Chicago, IL http://www.martyoutloud.com/
Tristan Silverman Chicago, IL http://silverspooky.com/wp-content/themes/clean-home/presskits/TS%20one%20pager.pdf
November 5 :
Sean Thomas Dougherty, Erie ,PA http://www.boaeditions.org/authors/dougherty.htm
December 3 :
Susan B. Anthony Somers-Willet, Brooklyn, NY http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=179688