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 Joan I. Siegel and Mary Makofske will be the featured readers when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at the Woodstock Town Hall, 76 Tinker Street, on Saturday, June 12th 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:

Joan I. Siegel - Joan I. Siegel is the author of two poetry collections. The first, published jointly with her husband, J. R. Solonche, is titled PEACH GIRL: POEMS FOR A CHINESE DAUGHTER (Grayson Books, 2001). Her first solo collection, HYACINTH FOR THE SOUL, was issued by Deerbrook Editions in Spring 2009.

Regarding HYACINTH…, former US Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin commented:

“These passionate, caring poems range seamlessly from personal lyric to public outcry, from a pair of well-turned pantoums of childhood memories to a poem that rewrites the liturgy of a responsive reading from the Passover service. Siegel knows how to go for the small specific details that illuminate even the darkest subjects.”

Her poems published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Commonweal, Raritan, among numerous journals and anthologies, Ms. Siegel is also recipient of the New Letters Poetry Prize and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award.

Professor Emerita of English at SUNY/Orange in Middletown, New York, she previously co-edited Wordsmith: a Journal of Poetry and Art, which featured the work of SUNY and CUNY faculty poets and artists.

Joan lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and daughter and assorted cats.

Mary Makofske - Mary Makofske lives with her husband in a solar house in Warwick, NY, where they enjoy a view of a mountain and a large vegetable, fruit, and flower garden. She's taught at Ramapo College of New Jersey and SUNY Orange, from which she retired in 2006.

Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Zone 3, Poetry East, Mississippi Review, Modern Haiku, Amoskeag, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and other literary magazines and in the anthologies In a Fine Frenzy: Poets Respond to Shakespeare (Iowa); Hunger and Thirst (City Works); Tangled Vines (HBJ); and Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge and Essential Love (Grayson).

She is the author of The Disappearance of Gargoyles (Thorntree) and Eating Nasturtiums, winner of a Flume Press chapbook competition. Individual poems have received the Robert Penn Warren Poetry Prize (Cumberland Poetry Review), the Lullwater Review Prize, the Spoon River Poetry Review Prize, and the Iowa Woman Prize.

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