For Immediate Release

Poets Susan Hoover and Donald Lev will be the featured readers when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at the Woodstock Town Hall, 76 Tinker Street, on Saturday, January 13th at 2pm. Note: WPS&F meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month except for October, when it is held on the 3rd Saturday.

The readings will be hosted by Woodstock area poet Phillip Levine. All meetings are free and open to the public.

Bios:

Susan Hoover - For many years, a performing musician, she has a long running private guitar practice and is on the faculty of Mannes College of Music. She teaches poetry in the schools for Teachers & Writers Collaborative and has published poems in Cover Arts New York, University of Colorado Literary Magazine, EPT, Dark Thirty, Granite, Cold Mountain Review, Isinglass Review, Home Planet News, Chronogram and other publications. Her books include The Magnet and The Target (The New School Chapbook Series, 1995), and Taxi Dancer (Exotic Beauties Press, 1979). She is also included in As If The World Had Not Known Sorrow (The Poets Press, 1986). She have given readings at many NYC venues, including The New School, The Kitchen, Cornelia Street Cafe and locally she has appeared as a featured reader at several Out Loud Festivals in Claryville, as well as the first two Woodstock Poetry Festivals, The Kleinert-James Gallery, The Colony Arts Center, The Albert Shehanian Fine Arts Gallery in Poughkeepsie. Together with Nancy Rullo and Janice King she was the third member of the All Right! Girls, a poetry performance group. Currently, she is working and performing collaboratively with the well known cellist, Sera Smolen. Jason Shinder has described her work as '...poems so strong they hurt...a breakthrough, sometimes roller-coaster journey of language and an emotional tenderness and toughness of the highest quality."

Donald Lev - Donald Lev was born in New York City in 1936. He attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for 20 years (with a 6-year hiatus in which he ran messages for, and contributed poetry to, The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). During those years he was also writing up a storm, giving many readings, and acting as the Phillip Levine or Robert Milby of his own time and place, coordinating poetry readings all over Manhattan and Brooklyn. His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958 and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969. The most recent of the fourteen collections of his poetry, GRIEF, was published by Bardpress/Ten Penny Players in Staten Island, NY. A "Selected Poems" will be brought out soon by Red Hill Outloudbooks, Claryville, NY, which had published three of his earlier collections. Donald Lev's brief underground film-acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of "The Poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 classic "Putney Swope". He and his reclusive cat Kit Smart live in High Falls, NY, where he spends most of his time publishing the literary tabloid HOME PLANET NEWS, which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979.

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