Women's Poetry Reading

Join us for a celebration of Women's History Month with poetry from our own local Hudson Valley poets!

IRENE O’GARDEN’S poetry has found its way to the Off –Broadway stage (Women On Fire), into hardcover (Fat Girl, Fulcrum:Selected Poems) paperback (Risking the Rapids, Glad to Be Human) children’s books (The Scrubbly Bubbly Car Wash, Maybe My Baby) and into many literary journals and anthologies.

Rain Lee is our youngest poet and is currently in the musical "Oklahoma!" for Haldane High School. She has written for her High school newspaper "THE BLUE PRINT" and has been in several musicals in her high school. 

Sandra Proto is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, blogger, and essayist originally from South Jamaica, Queens, and Rockaway. Sandra Proto has published two volumes of poetry: a full-length collection Wrapped Up In Life with Omniscient Eyes (2011) and a chapbook Spring’s Tepid Breath (2014). She is the editor of Move Over World; Mary Is About to Holla! Her work has been published in Bards Annual Anthologies,  Poets To Come Anthology, Sounds of Solace: Meditative Verse Newtown Literary Journal, Jam Journal, and TimBookTu.  

Mary Newell authored the poetry chapbooks Re-SURGE and TILT/ HOVER/ VEER, poems in journals and anthologies, and essays including “When Poetry Rivers” (Interim journal 38.3). She is co-editor of Poetics for the More-than-Human-World: An Anthology of Poetry and Commentary and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics. 

Catherine Gonick's poetry has appeared in many literary journals including Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, The Forge, and New Verse News, and in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice. Locally, she was a longtime, joyful participant in Irene O’Garden’s performing literary magazine, The Art Garden, and helped found the Depot Theatre in Garrison, where she attempted to act and had several plays produced, as well as Philipstown Reform Synagogue in Cold Spring. She works with her husband in Cold Spring in a company that slows the rate of global warming through climate repair and climate restoration projects around the world.

Judith Saunder's, a long-time resident of the Hudson Valley, she has published poetry and creative nonfiction in a wide variety of periodicals and anthologies. Most recently, her work has appeared in The Chiron Review, Dash, Folio, The Concho River Review, California Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, The MacGuffin, ISLE, and The South Carolina Review. She is the author of two prize-winning chapbook collections of poetry (Panhandler,Red Berry).

Lucia Cherciu is a Professor of English at Dutchess Community College and served as the 2021-2022 Dutchess County Poet Laureate. She is the author of six books of poetry, including Immigrant Prodigal Daughter (Kelsay Books, forthcoming 2023), Train Ride to Bucharest (Sheep Meadow Press, 2017), which received the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize.

Raphael Kosek’s latest book of poetry, HARMLESS ENCOUNTERS, won the 2021 Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY, a finalist at Brick Road Poetry Press, was released in 2019. ROUGH GRACE won the 2014 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest.  Her poems and lyric essays have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She served as the 2019-2020 Dutchess County, NY Poet Laureate where she teaches at Dutchess Community College.