POETS AT LARGE Spoken Word/Poetry Event: Featuring Beat Poets

Beat poets Paul “Word” Richmond, Deborah Tosun Kilday and Michael L. Kilday will be featured at the next Poets at Large event on Sunday, June 25th. This is part of a series of spoken word/poetry readings that have been held at The Rose Room Café, 4 East Main St., Webster, MA. This event is free to the public (ages 14 and up) and will be held from 2-4 p.m. There will be an intermission and an open mic after the featured poets. Anyone wishing to participate in the open mic should email karen.warinsky@gmail.com. Open mic readers will get 5 minutes each as time allows.

Richmond was named Beat Poet Laureate for Life in 2022 by the National Beat Poetry Foundation and he previously served as National Beat Poet Laureate (2019-2020), and as Beat Poet Laureate for Massachusetts (2017-19). Richmond is internationally known and hosts monthly readings and organizes yearly Word Festivals in Holyoke and Greenfield, MA, and he has a stage at the Garlic & Arts Festival each fall. He is the owner of Human Error Publishing and has overseen the publications of 55 poets and authors. His own works include Living in the Breakdown Lane, You Might Need a Bigger Hammer, Quadrillions Down the Pentagon Drain, and Swimming on the Titanic. He is also a member of the Funkadelic band “Do It Now.”

Deborah Tosun Kilday is a new generation beat poet and owner/CEO of the National Beat Poetry Foundation, Inc., founded in 2015 and registered in 2016, and she became a publisher in 2022 with her own imprint, “New Generation Beat Publications." In 2022 New Generation Beat Publications published four books: Tarrare & Other Poems by Carlo Parcelli; Int’l Beat Poetry Foundation Goddess Anthology 2022: Poets Celebrating Women; Remembering Jack Kerouac on His 100th Birthday 3-12-2022, National Beat Poetry Foundation & Friends; New Generation Beats: National Beat Poetry Foundation, Inc. 2022 Anthology. Published so far in 2023: Earth: Dig It: New Generation Beat Poets Laureate, an Anthology, among several others.  She is sometimes called the “Guardian of the Beats.” Besides her involvement in beat poetry, Tosun Kilday is a published author, writer, nature photographer, illustrator, artist, and expert high-roller slot player. Her book No Limits; How I Beat the Slots details her five-years as a high-roller slot player at casinos in Connecticut and Las Vegas, where she won 3.4 million dollars while playing slot machines

Michael L. Kilday, award winning writer, author, and poet, is a retired Aetna Senior Software Engineer of 35 years, a former newspaper reporter for the Bristol Press, and former high school English educator in Boston, MA. Michael is the author of the Truth Never Changes book trilogy, A Yippee’s Lament, a CT Press Club 1st prize award winner, and also the author of the poetry collection, No One Came Home from Woodstock. He is currently working on a historical novel tracing the origins of Christianity. He is the husband of Deborah Tosun Kilday. The couple live in Connecticut.

This year’s series at The Rose Room is sponsored in part by Hometown Bank, the Putnam Area Foundation, and Global Partners (Ashford Xtra Mart and Webster Honey Farms).

Find the Poets at Large 2023 schedule on Facebook.