Launching Three Decker, our new literary journal

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“The Worcester County Poetry Association has been celebrating Worcester’s rich literary history since its incorporation in 1971. At almost 30 years, it must stand as the Commonwealth’s longest-ongoing literary party. Worcester County has been particularly active in the last two years. A week does not pass without its poetry-related event, often many. This publication both acknowledges and springs from this dynamic. The contributors represent just about every current poetry venue, as well as a cross-section of our loyal and dedicated membership. Our aim is to reflect, in a casual and occasional manner, the excitement of these times.”

Robert Steele wrote the above as the Editor’s Note in the Autumn 1998 inaugural edition of The WCPA’s The Issue literary journal (Robert was then and is still a WCPA board member). Launched in 1998, The Issue was a “periodic publication,” as coined by a former guest editor and Paul Szlosek. It ran for seven issues between 1998 and 2001, with special issues released in 2009 and 2021.

The WCPA is bringing this journal back to Worcester County with a new name — Three Decker — but with the same vision and mission: promote poetry in Worcester County and fill a gap in our growing and vibrant local literary scene. The name, which we decided on through engaging our members in a brief contest to provide suggestions, is inspired by the iconic building structure for so many local homes within Worcester, giving a local nod while also speaking to a sense of neighborhood and community.

The WCPA already publishes the annual Worcester Review, a renowned journal open to submissions from anywhere. The organization also supports The Poet’s Cauldron and The Worcester Writer’s Collective as their fiscal sponsor, with members from those organizations on our board and WCPA members regularly attending their events. Smaller journals such as HexLiterary out of Worcester Polytechnic Institute give local writers, focusing primarily on short fiction. We’ve also worked with The Dirty Gerund and support what they bring to spoken word poetry, locally and nationally.

Where Three Decker fits in this amazing literary landscape is as a bi-annual and informal space for poetry for only Worcester County poets. Three Decker is designed to be a smaller, more frequent, and more relaxed publication that complements the annual and more formal style of The Worcester Review. 

Over the past several months, we have met to discuss the structure with previous editors and the editors for other journals to understand how best to re-introduce this journal to Worcester County poets. We proposed our ideas to the complete WCPA board, and they were accepted. We have digitized all previous issues of The Issue to include them in our new website, which will host accepted pieces and manage our process. We intend to launch the site in March and open it for submissions, with our first publication released in June 2025.

For over fifty years, the WCPA has supported poetry in Worcester County. This journal is another means to further our mission and contribute to everything the city contributes to the arts and humanities.

Check out Three Decker today at its own website, threedecker.org, and please consider submitting some poetry for our inaugural issue!

Rodger Martin Chosen for 2024 Stanley Kunitz Medal

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2024 KUNITZ MEDAL PRESS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

RODGER MARTIN Chosen for 2024 Stanley Kunitz Medal

The Stanley Kunitz Medal committee is pleased to announce Rodger Martin as the 2024 medal recipient.

Whether in New England, Great Britain, or China, Rodger Martin’s mission is to bring poetry into the public arena. The Worcester County Poetry Association grew and prospered under his leadership as president, board, and committee member. He served as managing editor of the nationally recognized journal The Worcester Review for almost three decades. As a devoted volunteer, his work in poetry communities in New England exceeds the highest standards demonstrated by medal recipients.

Who is Rodger Martin? He was born in Pennsylvania, spent his childhood in England, served as combat engineer in Vietnam, and is a journalism professor at Keene State College in New Hampshire, where he resides. He has won an Appalachia Award for poetry and a New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowship for fiction.  Simply put: Martin has earned the right to be called a citizen and poet of the world.

A seven-time recipient of the Bruce Kellner/Monadnock Fellowship, Martin mentored poets through a series of cultural exchanges between Monadnock Pastoral Poets and Writers, including a collaboration among poets, colleagues from Keene State University and pastoral poets and calligraphers in China. He was co-director of New Hampshire’s Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Out Loud. He leads a poetry reading series at Del Rossi’s Trattoria in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Rodger Martin’s publications include four books of poetry, most recently All the Tea in Zhōngguó and The Battlefield Guide. He currently serves as co-editor for Hobblebush Books’ Granite State Poetry Series.

The Stanley Kunitz Medal originated with a bequest to the Worcester County Poetry Association from the estate of former Poet Laureate of the United States and Worcester native Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006). Martin will be the tenth recipient of the medal, which is bestowed annually on a poet with a strong Worcester County connection who best exemplifies Kunitz’s lifelong commitment to poetry by teaching poetry, mentoring poets, speaking poetry, publishing poetry, and supporting organizations which nurture poetry.

Also honored with a nomination this year was poet Oliver de la Paz.

Rodger Martin will receive his medal at a ceremony presented by the Worcester County Poetry Association at the Worcester Historical Museum on Thursday, July 25th from 6:30-8:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. There is limited parking at the museum, with additional metered parking on the street and in the Pearl/Elm Street Garage. Visit worcestercountypoetry.org for details.

Respectfully submitted,

Judith Ferrara, Chair – Judy@PaletteAndPen.com

2024 Kunitz Medal Winner Press ReleaseDownload
Rodger Martin photo (for distribution)Download

The WCPA Online Bookstore is now live

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The Worcester County Poetry Association now has its own bookstore!

The Worcester County Poetry Association has set up our own bookstore at bookshop.org. Many non-profits, organizations, and individual writers have taken advantage of bookshop.org, which allows organizations to create branded versions of their platform to highlight local authors and poets, and now we’re excited to do the same.

We’ve started with a few books from our board members and look forward to growing this collection, starting with our members. As a new perk for all WCPA members, we would love to list your books in our bookstore.

Current WCPA members: Please use the form below to send us a link to your book. We’ll be sure to include it in the bookstore and help promote it. To ensure

  • The easiest way to list your book is to send us a link to the listing itself on bookshop.org. Go to their website, search for your book, and send us the link to that page.
  • If your book is not listed on bookshop.org, that’s okay! Please send us the ISBN number for your book, and we can load your book on to our shop that way.
  • I don’t have an ISBN! If you’re self-published and don’t have a listing on any websites or an ISBN, we likely won’t be able to help, but it doesn’t mean we can’t help promote your book in other ways. Please send us the title of your book and a link to your personal website or another source we can help promote, and we’ll see what we can do. We could also provide some instructions to help you obtain an ISBN if you would like, which may help promote your work elsewhere online.

Every purchase from our bookalso contributes a small amount to the WCPA, supporting our overall effort to promote poetry in Worcester County and our many programs.

If you’re not a member, please consider becoming a WCPA member today or purchasing one of the books from our new bookstore. We’d love to have you join us.

WCPA office book and furniture giveaway

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After five years at the Sprinkler Factory, the WCPA has moved its offices. We’ll share more about our new office space in the next newsletter; however, today, we are looking for help from our members and lovers of poetry to exit our old office.

We’re not asking you to help us move; everything we could take is already at its new home.  No, we’ve been blessed with an abundance of books and furniture we don’t have room for as we downsize.  We’d love for it to become part of your poetry library or collection.

Come to the old WCPA office at the Sprinkler Factory (38 Harlow Street, Worcester) on Saturday, 11/12/2022, and Saturday, 11/19/2022, for a “yard sale.” The doors will be open from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm on both days.  Take some of our furniture to a new home, pick up a book or five for your winter reading, or just come to say “hello.”

We have a PDF inventory of what was available as of this past Sunday at this link. Have a question? Email wcpaboard@yahoo.com, and we’ll do our best to answer it.

The Worcester Review, Volume 43, is coming soon!

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Volume 43 of The Worcester Review, the print journal of the Worcester County Poetry Association, includes poems by the winners and judge of the WCPA’s Frank O’Hara Contest and the winner of the college poetry contest Elizabeth Bishop Manuscript Prize; the second part of the feature “Artists in the Archive: Celebrating Twenty-five Years of Creative and Performing Artists and Writers Fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society,” edited by Kevin Wisniewski; and poetry and fiction by writers including Emma Bolden, JD Debris, Hannah Feustle, Eloise Klein Healey, Jose Hernandez Diaz, Rita Mookerjee, Gathondu Mwangi, and Lucy Zhang. Volume 43’s cover art is by Worcester artist Parker Milgram.

About the Cover Artist

Parker Milgram is a fine artist, author, and illustrator based in Massachusetts. Their art has been showcased in several exhibitions and was recently featured in Worcester Magazine. Parker loves to create original characters and is currently developing several picture books on themes of mental illness, grief, friendship, and neurodiversity. Find more of their work online at parkermilgram.com and @parkermilgram on Instagram.

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Announcing the Winners of the 2022 WCPA Poetry Contest: The Frank O’Hara Prize

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Jennifer Freed of Holden, Massachusetts, has won the 2022 Frank O’Hara Prize. The O’Hara Prize, awarded annually by the Worcester County Poetry Association (WCPA), was established in 1973. Freed’s poem “Kangaroos in Kharkiv” was selected by contest judge Usman Hameedi from the 89 submissions by 34 entrants.

Photo of poet and 2022 O'Hara Prize winner Jennifer Freed

Jennifer L. Freed is the author of When Light Shifts (Kelsay, 2022), a memoir-in-poems about the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage, and of a chapbook, These Hands Still Holding, a finalist in the 2013 New Women’s Voices Competition (Finishing Line Press, 2014).  She was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize for a long poem or poem-sequence (New England Poetry Club), has been a finalist for the Frank O’Hara prize multiple times, and has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize and Orison Anthology.  She leads adult education programs online and in person and lives in Holden, Massachusetts.

Four additional winners were selected by Usman Hameedi.

  • Second Place – Lis Beasley of Uxbridge, Massachusetts, for “The Father as a Magician”
  • Third Place – Cheryl Bonin of Sutton, Massachusetts, for “Burnt”
  • Honorable Mention – Glenn D’Alessio of West Brookfield, Massachusetts, for “A Lobotomy”
  • Honorable Mention – Dennis Rhodes of Naples, Florida, for “Question”

The winning poems will be published in the next edition of The Worcester Review, the nationally recognized journal of the WCPA. The winners also receive a cash award. The WCPA will invite all the winners to read their work at the Winners’ Ceremony and Reading on Sunday, September 25, 2022, at 3:00 p.m.

The Winners’ Reading will be held at the First Unitarian Church, 90 Main Street, Worcester. Contest judge Usman Hameedi will be our featured reader that afternoon.

Usman Hameedi is a Pakistani-American scientist, poet, and educator. He also serves on Mass Poetry’s Board of Directors.   He earned his MS in Biomedical Sciences from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.  During his graduate studies, he did additional work in medical humanities and volunteered in geriatric care at Mount Sinai Hospital.  Neuroscience and oncology are his primary areas of scientific interest and expertise.  Since 2008, he has competed in and coached for collegiate, national, and international level poetry slams.  He was featured on The Huffington Post, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, and The Story Collider: Storytelling for Scientists podcast.  His first full-length collection is forthcoming in 2023 and will be published by Button Poetry.

The poetry contest was renamed the Frank O’Hara Prize in 2009 and continues to be generously supported as a tribute to the late poet Frank O’Hara by the O’Hara family.

Spam calls from the WCPA phone number

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We’ve learned that the WCPA phone number is being used to call people for spam/scam purposes.  No one from the WCPA will ever call and ask for personal information.

We are working with our phone provider to try to resolve this issue.  Please accept our sincere apologies if you have been impacted by a spam call from our number.

Tony Brown Chosen for Kunitz Medal

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Proclaimed a “Slam Poet Legend” by Poetry Slam International, Worcester poet Tony Brown has been selected as the 2022 Stanley Kunitz Medal recipient.

Brown is widely known throughout Worcester’s poetry community and beyond. During nearly five decades of shepherding poetry from “the page to the stage,” he has established himself as a poet, essayist, teacher, pacesetter among slam team poets, editor, and venue host. Brown is cofounder of The Duende Project, a spoken word and music quartet that performs locally and along the East Coast, in addition to releasing six collections of their work. Brown’s daily blog, “Dark Matters,” attracts over 3000 readers, and his poems have garnered seven Pushcart Prize nominations.

The Stanley Kunitz Medal originated with a bequest to the Worcester County Poetry Association from former Poet Laureate of the United States and Worcester native Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006). Brown’s award will be the eighth annual medal bestowed on a poet with a strong Worcester County connection who best exemplifies Kunitz’s lifelong commitment to poetry. The award recognizes a poet’s commitment to poetry as Kunitz lived it: teaching poetry, mentoring poets, speaking poetry, publishing poetry, and supporting organizations which nurture poetry.

Also nominated this year were poets Curt Curtin, David Macpherson, and Laura Jehn Menides.

Tony Brown will receive his medal at a ceremony presented by the Worcester County Poetry Association at the Worcester Historical Museum on Thursday, July 28th from 6:30-8:30 p.m. There is limited parking at the museum, with additional parking on street and in the Pearl/Elm Street Garage. Visit the 2022 Kunitz Medal Ceremony event page for details.

 

Haiku workshop this Thursday, April 7, 2022

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Join West Boylston writer Loree Griffin Burns to reconsider and reconnect with the natural world through this seemingly simple poetic form. This group is for teenagers and adults, beginner to master, interested in exploring haiku in English. Join us monthly to wander indoors and out, to read, to write, and to share our poems.

Please email beaman @ cwmars . org at least 24 hours prior to this program to register.

Plan Update – April 2022

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Since our last update, the WCPA has continued to reflect on how we interact with the communities of Worcester County. A part of that process has involved hiring a consultant to help us create a roadmap for incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion in our activities and membership.

The WCPA hired Sarah B. Lange to lead us through an Adaptive Planning process. It included a survey of all WCPA members, an in-person planning retreat in October 2021, and guidance for two sub-committees focused on Programming and Infrastructure.

Sarah shared several artifacts from the process.

Summary and Key Recommendations

Survey Summary

Retreat Goals

Infrastructure Committee Work Plan

Programming Committee Work Plan

While our time working with Sarah has ended, the work has only just begun. We will share some of the process’s output at our in-person annual meeting on April 3, 2022.

Previous Updates

Plan Update – June 2021

Statement – April 2021

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