Poets @ Large Presents: MASS BEAT POET LAUREATE & CT STATE POET LAUREATE READING

Current Massachusetts Poet Laureate Linda Bratcher Wlodyka will be featured along with CT
State Poet Laureate Antoinette Brim-Bell in a free spoken-word event at Roseland Park in Woodstock, CT. This free poetry/spoken word event is sponsored by Poets at Large and will be held September 15th, 2-4 p.m. in the barn at Roseland Park, 205 Roseland Park Road. This is the fifth year for the regional group to bring poets to the park. Featured with Wlodyka will be Brim-Bell and Christopher Reilley, former poet of Dedham, MA.

Sign up for open mic at karen.warinsky@gmail.com. Five- minute limit as time allows. Recommended for ages 14 and up.

Wlodyka is the current Massachusetts Beat Poet Laureate, 2023-2025. In the summer of 2023, Linda was chosen as a contributor to WordxWord a summer poetry festival in the Berkshires where she collaborated with a team of poets creating a very large poem that was read aloud for the audience at The Mount. She also has held the position as a docent at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s summer home in Lenox, MA from 2002 -2006. She retired as an educator from Mt. Greylock Regional School District in Williamstown in 2020. Wlodyka’s poem, “Secret Cottage,” was voted Best in the Berkshires in 2012, and she has three chapbooks previously self-published; Her Spirited Cameo, Voices from the Blue Room and Tick Tock. If Brambles Were Bookends, Collected Poems, is her first full length poetry collection (Human Error Publishing, 2023). Wlodyka is a member of the Florence Poet’s Society.

Brim-Bell is in the second year of her term as the poet laureate of Connecticut. She is Connecticut’s 8th state poet laureate and 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.  Additionally, Brim-Bell has published critical work and essays, most notably: “Living Behind the Numbers: A Statistic Muses about her Life” (National Association of African American Studies Monograph Series); “The Myopic Eye in Alice Walker’s ‘Flowers’” (Critical Insights: Alice Walker, Salem Press) and “Juxtaposed Dichotomies: the idealized white suburban pastoral, the surrealist tableau of black poverty & the women in between” (The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent, Haymarket Books).  A printmaker and collage artist, Brim-Bell also serves on various arts and humanitarian boards among many other accomplishments. She is a speaker, educator and consultant, as well as a Professor of English at Capital Community College in Hartford.

Reilley (former poet laureate for Dedham, MA) is a contributing editor at Acoustic Ink. He has been involved in print and print production for over thirty years, working for such companies as Xerox, EFI, Ricoh USA and Online Print Solutions. He is a copywriter for the Bytesized Studio. His poems have appeared in a wide number of publications, including the Boston Literary Journal, Word Salad Poetry, Wild Winds, Coldnoon, Travel Poetics and many others. His work can be found in several anthologies. Poets at Large is a project of Windham Arts. This series is sponsored in part by bankHometown, Charter Oak Federal Credit Union, and Weiss, Hale & Zahansky Strategic Wealth Advisors and Global Partners and Tom and Kathy Borner and Linemaster Switch.