For Immediate Release

Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival as part of the Woodstock Arts Consortium is sponsoring the following poetry event as part of the Woodstock "Second Saturdays" Art Events. For a full listing of "Second Saturday" events, see: www.artsinwoodstock.org

Poets Philip Memmer and Roger Mitchell will be the featured readers when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at the Woodstock Community Center, 56 Rock City Road, on Saturday, March 13th at 2pm. Note: WPS&F meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month.

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

Bios:

Philip Memmer - Philip Memmer is the author of three books of poems: Lucifer: A Hagiography, which was awarded the Idaho Prize from Lost Horse Press and was published in January 2009; Threat of Pleasure (Word Press 2008), winner of the 2008 Adirondack Literary Award for Poetry); and Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (Word Press, 2004). He is also the author of three chapbooks of poems, including Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications), The Apartment (piccadilly press) and For Resident (FootHills Publishing).

Philip Memmer's poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Epoch, Tar River Poetry, and many others. His work has also appeared in several anthologies, including 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins, and in Don't Leave Hungry: 50 Years of Southern Poetry Review. His work has also been included in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" syndicated newspaper column.

Memmer is the director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA of Greater Syracuse, where he founded the Downtown Writer's Center in 2001. He lives in upstate new York.

Roger Mitchell - Roger Mitchell is the author of ten books of poetry, a work of nonfiction, and numerous reviews and essays.

His work has appeared in leading journals in the U.S. and abroad and has been anthologized more than thirty times. Awards for this work include the Midland Poetry Award for his first book, Letters From Siberia, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear Pond: The Reconstruction of a Life, a work of nonfiction, for which he was also made an honorary citizen of the Town of North Hudson in Essex County, New York, and the Akron Prize in Poetry for his book, Delicate Bait. He has twice received a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent book, Lemon Peeled the Moment Before: New and Selected Poems, published by Ausable Press late last year, won Adirondack Literary Festival's Readers' Choice Award for Best Book of 2008.

For many years he taught in and directed the MFA program at Indiana University–Bloomington and was for ten years Director of that university's summer writers' conference. Today he lives in Jay, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy. This is the part of the world he came from. Their piece of it is part of an old farm in the Ausable Valley with

...low hills clustered thick
around some rocks the river hasn't budged
in ten thousand years. Tools and their uses
scattered along the fence, only a few
of which I recognize, but, clear or not,
I carry what I can lift out to the field,
and make a few arrangements out of things
that, if they didn't give life, made it work.

—from “Farmers”

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