Femme Verse: Shattering Love's Stereotypes

Join us for a reading on Shattering the stereotypes of what love means this month. 

We will have our own amazing known local poet Irene 'O Garden who will be emceeing the event! 

This program is generously funded thanks to the Putnam Arts Council.

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. O' Garden is known for her eloquent exploration of personal experiences and emotions through her writing. 

Our panel of poets reciting ... 

Lily Greenberg is a poet from Nashville, Tennessee and the author of In the Shape of a Woman (Broadstone Books 2022). Her work has appeared in New England Review, On the Seawall, Cortland Review, Ecotone, and Eco Theo Review, among others, and she is the 2023 prize winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review‘s National Poetry Month Contest as well as the 2021 recipient of the Dick Shea Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her poetry has been funded by Bread Loaf Writers, ArtsWestchester, and Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and she holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. She lives in Nyack, New York where she organizes writing programs through the Carson McCullers House of Nyack, works in grants for Columbia University, and serves as Advisory Committee Member of the Hudson Valley Writers Center's Slapering Hol Press. Learn more at lily-greenberg.com.

Jennifer Franklin holds degrees from Brown University and Columbia University School of the Arts. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023). With Nicole Callihan & Pichchenda Bao, she co-edited the anthology, Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, March 2024). In 2021, Franklin received both a NYFA/City Artist Corps grant and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Her work has been published widely including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, and Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion” and has been nominated several times for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. In March 2023, Diane Seuss chose one of Franklin’s poems for The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day.” She teaches craft workshops in Manhattanville’s MFA program and 24 Pearl Street of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as Program Director.
 

Mary Lou Buschi’s most recent book is Paddock (Lily Poetry Review Books, April 2021). Her next book is Blue Physics (Lily Poetry Review Books, February 2024). Her poems have appeared in many journals, such as Laurel Review, On the Seawall, Ploughshares, and Field, among others. She is a special education teacher in the Bronx. Mary Lou lives in Nyack, NY.