POETS AT LARGE Spoken Word/Poetry Event

Featuring Connecticut State Poet Laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell

The current Connecticut State Poet Laureate (2022-2025), Antoinette Brim-Bell will read on June 4 th at Roseland Park. This reading will be held in the barn and will be from 2-4 p.m. Reading with Ms. Brim-Bell will be former poet laureate of West Haven, Tony Fusco, and author/poet Karen Warinsky of Woodstock. This event is free to the public (ages 14 and up) and begins this year’s readings in the park which include events on Sept. 10 th and Oct. 8 th . 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.

Brim-Bell is the author of three full-length poetry collections: These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love, and Psalm of the Sunflower. She is a Cave Canem Foundation Fellow and an alumna of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA). Her poetry has appeared in various journals, magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, including Villanelles, 44 on 44: Forty-Four African American Writers on the 44th President of the United States, Not A Muse, and has appeared in Poetry Magazine and Poem-a-Day, as well as numerous critical essays.

A printmaker and collage artist, Brim-Bell has exhibited her work widely, serves on several arts organization boards and is a professor of English at Capital Community College in Hartford, CT. Tony Fusco was West Haven, Connecticut’s Poet Laureate in 2019. He is the past president of the Connecticut Poetry Society and has edited several poetry anthologies. Fusco received The Eve Cummings Poetry Prize, among other awards, and he produced the poetry series West Shore Poets at Citizen’s Television in New Haven.

Karen Warinsky is a former finalist of the Montreal International Poetry Contest and is the coordinator of Poets at Large, a group of regional poets who perform in Connecticut and Massachusetts. She is the author of two books of poetry, Gold in Autumn (2020) and Sunrise Ruby (2022) both from Human Error Publishing. Other published work includes the short story, “Decatur Girl” featured in Dear Nana, (Pegasus Books) two poems in the 2017 anthology Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands, (Shabda Press) and poems in editions of Blue Heron, Light; a Journal of Photography and Poetry, the 2019 Mizmor Anthology, Deep Wild Journal, Honoring Nature, Circumference and Consilience.