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 Katherine Hastings and Rachel Marco-Havens will be the featured readers along with an open mike when the Woodstock Poetry Society & Festival meets at the Woodstock Community Center, 56 Rock City Road, on March 9, 2013. Note: WPS&F meetings are held the 2nd Saturday of every month.

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

Bios:

Katherine Hastings - Katherine Hastings is the author of Cloud Fire (Spuyten Duyvil NYC, 2012) and several chapbooks, including Updraft (Finishing Line Press, 2010). She is the host of the poetry program WordTemple on NPR affiliate KRCB FM and curator of the WordTemple Poetry Series in Sonoma County, CA. Her Small Change Series of WordTemple Press has published beat poet David Meltzer, San Francisco poet laureate emerita devorah major, Elizabeth Coleman, and many others. She is the editor of the anthology What Redwoods Know — Poems from California State Parks (all proceeds benefit the California State Parks Foundation). Hastings grew up in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco and currently lives in Sonoma County with her partner, CJ Rayhill and Chihuahua, Gizmo Federíco Garcia Lorca. For more information go to www.wordtemple.com and www.krcb.org/wordtemple
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About Cloud Fire
How refreshing to come across a book like Katherine Hastings’ marvelous Cloud Fire, rich and verdant in formal experiment and range. Mixing lyrics, narratives, curses, blessings, spells, and unabashed love poems, the work is hard-won and honest, generous and rigorous. In poem after poem Katherine Hastings casts her ever-vigilant, observing eye, sharp as it is poignant. Her deepest concern seems our perilous locale and planet: “My city whose streams are rock doves and parrots/ whose bright arm is a spring board for love and suicides” and yet “we breathe here better than anywhere, distressed.” - Gillian Conoley

Lovely... it’s your veiled history. - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

For Katherine Hastings, “The mirror is a lake of longing.” Her poems are told us by “a woman with a moon in her chest”; their surprising images embrace close observation, deeply dramatized love and losses, and have the power of crossing boundaries of spirit to reveal truths otherwise unseen. - Daniel Hoff man, U.S. Poet Laureate, 1973-74

Katherine Hastings is a poet whose words embody light; she is the ambassador of luminescence to American poetry today. It is no wonder that clouds catch on fire in this magnificent and transformative collection. In poems like “Whittenberg”, where an atmosphere of light invades and reshapes, “Pushing off from the Wall”, where white cells of water, jewel-lined/undulate amoeba-shapes, and “Twister” clear blue prophecy is proclaimed. In “Bird. Song. Knife. Heart” (No one saw her glide among the lake or river/a radiance wrapped in flame), and “Mother” (“Light transfers from the formless/smatters across the given/world”), and so many others, Hastings truly succeeds in evoking a continent of light on radiant pages ...There is no voice like hers! I wholeheartedly recommend Cloud Fire, poems that will illumine your consciousness both while reading and long, long afterwards. - Lee Slonimski

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Rachel Marco-Havens - Born four days after the famous festival, Rachel Marco-Havens grew up in Woodstock, NY. Surrounded by metaphysical books, music and health food, her first job was in the epicenter of the progressive movement in the small but eccentric town. As the New Age gathered momentum, she began her path of seeking- and finding answers to questions asked by the elders in her community before embarking on her teen years.

The bulk of her twenties was spent at Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, the Seat of His Holiness Karmapa (the lineage holder of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism) where she found herself serving and studying with some of the most profound teachers in the tradition. Travel in North India and Nepal rounded her experience, book-ending her time spent in the monastery.

Having chosen a life spent in quest -- professionally she has worn many hats. Rachel's diverse resume includes work as a chef; ranging the gamut from catering specialized diets to recording studio kitchens. Jewelery design, writing, concert promotion, music distribution/marketing, publicity and performance name a few hats. Her tactile immersion in the spiritual, service and music industries gives her a unique perspective. Being a Mother helps too...

Rachel Lives in Woodstock with her Honey and her Son, she is currently writing as her main form of expression.

See haikuforthought.com for more.

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