Poetorium Too Reading

Poetorium Too Poetry Reading & Open Mic Featuring Stephen Campiglio, Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, & Simon Hunt 

Please join us for a special Tuesday triple feature edition of our monthly open mic and featured poetry reading series  Poetorium Too at TidePool Bookshop (located at 372 Chandler Street in Worcester, MA) on September 29th, 2026 from 5 pm to 7 pm hosted by Paul Szlosek and (hopefully) Ron Whittle.  It will be a full two hours of poetry and spoken word featuring 20 minute readings each by poets Stephen Campiglio,  Claire Schaeffer-Duffy, & Simon Hunt, followed by the passing of a hat to pay our features, a short intermission, and then an open mic with 5-minute slots for each reader if time allows (in order to fit everything planned into our allotted time, if the event runs too long, readers may be restricted to one poem).

Stephen Campiglio lives in southern Worcester County and works at Connecticut State Community College in Manchester, where he also founded and directed for 12 years the Mishi-maya-gat Spoken Word & Music Series. He co-edited and contributed to the Noh Place Poetry Anthology and was a winner in Mapping Worcester in Poetry: Poems in and Out of Places. His poetry, and his Italian translations, have also appeared of late in The Closed Eye Open, Delos, Gradiva, Italian Americana, Poet Lore, SurVision, and Wild Roof Journal, and a featured section of his poems translated into Italian by Barbera Carle has appeared in Journal of Italian Translation. Stephen recently won the inaugural Bill Tremblay Poetry Prize (sponsored by the Jacob Edwards Library) and had a poem selected for the collection, Remembering Wallace Stevens, published by Moon Arts Center. His book-length translation from the Italian, with Elena Borelli, of Giovanni Pascoli’s 1903 volume of poems, Canti di Castelvecchio, was recently published by Italica Press.

Claire Schaeffer-Duffy is a poet & freelance writer living in Worcester, MA. A childhood spent overseas left her eternally hungry for travel. Writing has allowed her to pursue that yearning. Her reviews and essays have appeared in various publications including America Magazine, Commonweal, and Consequence. Her reporting for the National Catholic Reporting has garnered a number of awards from the Catholic Press Association. She comes to poetry late in life grateful for a form that inculcates marvel.

Simon Hunt moved to Massachusetts, after having lived in Monterey, California, for 20 years and Las Vegas, Nevada, for three. He has been a teacher for more than four decades, predominantly in California and predominantly at the high school level.  Simon was born in what is now Zimbabwe and also lived in South Africa and the United Kingdom as well as the USA during his childhood.  His poems have been published widely in print and online journals. 2018 saw the publication of his first collection, Lesser Magi, and in 2019 his first play, Re-run, was performed.  Endlings, his second collection of poems, was published in 2023.  The father of two, he served the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation in Carmel, California, as a volunteer tour docent and trustee for over a decade.  He lives in Ashburnham, with his wife, novelist Melissa (Dorval) Hunt.

——————————