99
North Main
Rochester, VT 05767
(802) 767-9670
Summer Reading Series 2010
Bigtown Gallery’s Summer Reading
Series brings its audience writers of regional and national
renown to read from their work each Sunday evening beginning July
11th and running through August 29th .
We extend our thanks to Joan Hutton
Landis and Tracy Winn, both long-time summer residents of Rochester,
Vermont, and as well, to Gary Margolis, the Executive Director of
Counseling, and Associate Professor of English at Middlebury College.
These friends of the gallery have been readers multiple times in the
preceding five years of the series and have lent considerable effort
to helping our expansion of the series to include other outstanding
regional authors.
We are delighted to present the writers
listed below as featured readers in 2010’s Summer Reading
Series. Join us these Sunday evenings to enjoy the best of poetry
and prose in a congenial setting.
Sunday,
July 11 5:30 – 6:30
Terri Ford &
David Huddle
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Terri Ford is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She’s been a fellow at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, a summer resident of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown through the Ohio Arts Council, and the recipient of several grants. She is the author of “Why the Ships Are She” (Four Way, 2001) and "Hams beneath the Firmament" (Four Way, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Conduit, Forklift Ohio and many other journals.
"Terri Ford
....seems to me someone who's right down in it, like a healthy poetic
dog, a setter, lovely bird dog, sniffing, dashing back and forth,
finding everything out."
—Richard Silberg, in
a review of her first book in POETRY FLASH (No. 188)
David Huddle is an American multi-genre writer and professor. His most recent book is Glory River: Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2008). His poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Story, The Autumn House Anthology of Poetry, and The Best American Short Stories. His work has also been included in anthologies of writing about the Vietnam War. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and currently teaches both creative fiction, poetry, and autobiography at the University of Vermont and at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. Having grown up in Ivanhoe, Wythe County, Virginia, he is sometimes considered an Appalachian writer. Huddle has lived in Vermont for the past thirty-eight years.
Sunday,
July 18 5:30 – 6:30
Janie Fink & Jay
Parini
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Janie Fink was born and raised in Roanoke, Virginia, and educated at the University of Virginia and Columbia University. Her poetry has appeared in Antaeus, Margie, Poetry East, and the Virginia Quarterly Review and her essays and reviews have appeared in The Journal and Verse. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and daughter.
“Janie Fink’s is
a world closely observed, a world well lived in. Her poetry sparks
with the details of the everyday, of the mundane, of the
extraordinary sense of being alive.”
—Daniel Halpern
Jay Parini, a poet and novelist, teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His novels include The Apprentice Lover, Benjamin's Crossing, and The Last Station (soon to be a motion picture). His fifth volume of poetry was The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems (2005). He has written biographies of John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner, in addition to The Art of Teaching (2005) and Why Poetry Matters (2008). His reviews and essays appear frequently in major periodicals, including The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Guardian.
Sunday,
July 25 5:30 – 6:30
Jody Gladding &
Cynthia Huntington
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Jody Gladding is a translator as well as poet. Her translations from French to English include Sylviane Agacinski’s Time Passing (2003, Columbia University Press), Michel Pastoureau’s The Devil’s Cloth (2001, Columbia University Press), and Pierre Moinot’s As Night Follows Day (2001, Welcome Rain). Her translation of Jean Giono’s The Serpent of Stars (Archipelago, 2004) was a finalist for the 2004 French–American Translation Prize. She is the author of Stone Crop, which was the 1993 Yale Younger Poets award winner, and she has also received a Whiting Writers Award in poetry. In 2000, Gladding was selected by then Vermont State Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt to participate in a Readers Digest Foundation-funded program called “The Poet Next Door,” working directly with Vermont high school students in person and through an interactive television network. Gladding also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College. Her most recent book is The Moon Rose (Chester Creek Press, 2006), with accompanying woodcuts by Susan Walp. She lives in Vermont.
“In cadences uncannily imbued with
the exaltations, strivings, and hesitancies of human thought, Jody
Gladding limns interior and exterior worlds like no other. Words
atomize on the page; pacing itself becomes a radical and spiritual
force, elemental as the trees, stones, landscapes, skies, which
infuse these meticulously exploratory and wondrous poems. Gladding
paints with great grace ‘the broken / surface where business / must
go on’ and the inexplicable universe that contains it, the textures
and intricacies of the human mind that strives to grasp while knowing
it can only partly understand.”
—Laurie Sheck, author of
Captivity
Cynthia Huntington is a poet, memoirist and a professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She has published several books of poetry, most recently The Radiant (Four Way Books, 2003). In 2004 she was named Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She has published poems in numerous literary journals and magazines including TriQuarterly, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Cimarron Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Sribner, 2008) and Contemporary Poetry of New England (Middlebury College Press, 2002).Huntington has received grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, as well as two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Other awards include: the Robert Frost Prize from The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, the Jane Kenyon Award in Poetry, and the Emily Clark Balch Prize. She was born in Meadville, Pennsylvania, and received her M.A. from The Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She lives in Vermont.
"Cynthia Huntington's poems do
what the best poems do--they move us profoundly and stir our deepest
longing for beauty."
—Annie Dillard
BigTown BigTent Poetry, Music &
Performing Arts Festival
July 31– August 8, 2010
Sunday, August 1 6:00
– 7:00 Galway Kinnell
Sunday, August 8 6:00
– 7:00 Vijay Seshadri
a fee will be charged for these two
events
Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 1, 1927. In his youth, he was drawn to both the musicality and hermetic wisdom of poets like Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. In 1948, he graduated from Princeton University, where he was classmates with W. S. Merwin. He later received his Master's degree from the University of Rochester. After serving in the United States Navy, he spent several years of his life traveling, including extensive tours of Europe and the Middle East, especially Iran and France. His first book of poems, What a Kingdom It Was, was published in 1960, followed by Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964). Upon his return to the United States, Kinnell joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) as a field worker and spent much of the 1960s involved in the Civil Rights Movement. His many experiences with social activism during this time, including an arrest while participating in a workplace integration in Louisiana, found their way into his collection Body Rags (1968), and especially The Book of Nightmares (1971), a book-length poem concerned with the Vietnam War. Kinnell has published several more volumes of poetry, including Strong Is Your Hold (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); A New Selected Poems (2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980). He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, François Villon, and Rainer Maria Rilke. Prose works by Kinnell include collection of interviews, Walking Down the Stairs (1978), a novel, Black Light (1966), and children's book, How the Alligator Missed Breakfast (1982). About his work, Liz Rosenberg wrote in the Boston Globe: "Kinnell is a poet of the rarest ability, the kind who comes once or twice in a generation, who can flesh out music, raise the spirits and break the heart." Kinnell's honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the 1974 Shelley Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and the 1975 Medal of Merit from National Institute of Arts and Letters. He has served as poet-in-residence at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of California at Irvine, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, and Brandeis, and divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He is now retired and resides at his home in Vermont.
Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University, and has lived in many parts of the country, including the Pacific Northwest, where he spent five years working in the fishing and logging industries, and New York's Upper West Side, where he was a sometime graduate student in Columbia's Ph.D. program in Middle Eastern Languages and Literature. His collections of poems include James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004) and Wild Kingdom (1996). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, The Yale Review, the Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Bomb, The San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and The Best American Poetry 1997 and 2003. Seshadri has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been awarded The Paris Review's Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony's Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. He holds an A.B. degree from Oberlin College and an M.F.A. from Columbia University. He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.
Sunday, August 15 5:30
– 6:30
Cynthia Morrison Phoel
Book-signing for her recent book: Cold
Snap: Bulgarian Stories
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Cynthia Morrison Phoel served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Bulgarian town not unlike the one in her stories. She holds degrees from Cornell University and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Harvard Review, and Cerise Press. She lives near Boston with her husband and three children.
“The writing is pitch-perfect; the
stories are powerful and heartbreaking. There won’t be many books
published this year of the same quality.”
—Robert Boswell, author of The
Heyday of Insensitive Bastards.
Sunday, August 22 5:30
– 6:30
Rebecca T. Godwin & Sydney Lea
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Rebecca Godwin has published two novels, Private Parts (Longstreet Press) and Keeper of the House (St. Martin’s Press). Her short fiction has appeared in Paris Review, Epoch, South Carolina Review, The Sun, and elsewhere, most recently in The Oxford American’s s “Best of the South 2009” issue. Among her honors are National Endowment for the Arts and MacDowell Colony fellowships. She has twice served as screening judge for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, has judged the S.C. Fiction Fellowship, and was screening judge for The Atlantic’s s 2010 student writing competition. She teaches literature and writing at Bennington College, where she is also faculty editor for the plain china: Best Undergraduate Writing series, an online anthology of undergraduate writing and art from across the country.
"Keeper of the House is quite
simply one of the most beautiful novels I have ever read. Lend your
ear to the astonishing music of Minyon Manigault's voice, yield your
heart to her remarkable tale, and you will want to claim her as kin.
Rebecca Godwin is a writer whose gifts go far beyond ‘talent.' She
is wise compassionate, daring; she has made a book of deep and
lasting value."
—Susan Dodd, author of Mamaw
and The Mourner's Bench
Sydney Lea’s most recent collection of poems is Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books, 2005). His second nonfiction volume, A Little Wildness: Some Notes On Rambling, was published in 2006. Lea has two collections of poetry scheduled for publication by Four Way Books: Young of the Year (2011) and I Was Thinking of Beauty (2013). He is widely known as an adept in several genres. He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. Of his seven previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound, (University of Illinois Press, 2000), was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize. In 1989, Lea also published the novel A Place in Mind with Scribner, and the book is still available in paper from Story Line Press. His 1994 collection of naturalist essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home, was re-issued in paper by the Lyons Press in 2003. Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges, as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. He lives in Newbury, Vermont, where he is active in statewide literacy and conservation efforts.
“Sydney Lea is as fine a companion
on the page as American writing about nature has to offer.”
—Michael Pollan,
Harper's
Sunday, August 29 5:30
– 6:30
Tal Birdsey
Book-signing for his recent book Room
for Learning
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Tal Birdsey is the founder of The North Branch School and a regular contributor to Schoolbook: A Journal of Education. He is the author of Room for Learning, a blow-by-blow account of Birdsey’s early adventures creating and teaching in The North Branch School. He lives in Ripton, Vermont.
"If education
interests you—if kids interest you—this is a magical story. It's
about what happens if you take adolescents seriously, and if you have
the grace and agility to hang with them in the tough spots and the
glorious ones. Nothing you've read for a long time will make you much
more optimistic about the possibilities for the future. And if you're
an educator, or thinking of becoming one, nothing will remind you
more powerfully of the nobility of your calling.”
—Bill McKibben,
author of The End of Nature and Deep Economy
Saturday, September 11 5:30
– 6:30
Cynthia King
Book-signing
reading in the main
gallery
no fee
Cynthia King has published three novels and one chapter book for young children, numerous book reviews and short stories.She has been a magazine editor, a free-lance magazine writer, a creative writing teacher in public and private secondary schools, lecturer at various writing conferences, universities, schools and libraries, director of several symposia on aspects of writing. She has been honored with a Creative Writers Grant from Michigan Council for the Arts. and a Creative Non-Fiction award from Detroit Working Writers. Memberships include Authors Guild, Poets and Writers, Detroit Working Writers. A native of Manhattan Island, she now lives in New Hampshire.
Summer Reading Series 2009
August 3rd - Paul Muldoon
August 10th - Mark Strand
August 16th - Tracy Winn reading from her recently published short story collection "Mrs. Somebody, Somebody"
August 23rd - Richard Hawley, Gary Margolis, Sue Ellen Thompson
August 30th - Joan Hutton Landis , Thomas Powers, and Robert Williams