Tana Miller and Jan Schmidt Read from "Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows"

Join us on Tuesday October 8th at 7PM as Tana Miller and Jan Z. Schmidt join us in the Steinberg Room to read from their newly-published collaborative volume Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows. Register to receive an email reminder the day before the program. Inquiring Minds Bookstore will be selling copies of the book at the event.


The poems in the volume are inspired by the life and works of Joseph Cornell. The poets have collaborated on a chapbook focusing on Cornell’s process, the people in his life, and themes of enclosure vs. transfiguration, memory, desire, loss, and the permanence gained through artistic creation. As one critic noted, the artist was obsessed both with the “ruins” of life and the desire to capture fleeting moments in time.

Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz in the Department of English.  Her work has been published in many journals including The Alaska Quarterly Review,  Kansas Quarterly,  Memoir (and), and the Vassar Review.    Her work also has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series.  She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000) and two collections of autobiographical essays, Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women:  Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life, co-authored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge, 2000). In addition, she co-authored with Laurence Carr an anthology of women’s writing from the Hudson Valley:  A Slant of Light:  Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill, 2013), which won the USA Best Book Award for Anthology. Her poetry volume, Foraging for Light, was published in September 2019 by Finishing Line Press.  Recently her chapbook about Bess Houdini, Over the Moon Gone:  The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini was published by Palooka Press.

Tana Miller, during a thirty year teaching career, has authored language arts curriculum guides for her school district, co-founded and facilitated a grade 5-8 annual literary magazine, presented whole language workshops in Hudson Valley schools and at the New York State Reading Conference. Tana co-founded and participated as a volunteer for ten years at a book group at Danbury Federal Prison for Women in Danbury, Connecticut. Since her retirement she has been an active volunteer at several food pantries and soup kitchens as well as an activist for the cause of racial justice. Her poetry has been published in several feminist journals and in Writing in A Woman’s Voice, A Slant of Light (Codhill Press), An Apple in Her Hand (co-author, Codhill Press), Rethinking the Ground Rules (co-author, Mediacs Books). She has taught creative writing as well as memoir writing at Life Spring Institute, Saugerties, New York. Tana cannot remember one day in her life when she didn’t spend some time reading. She also considers her flock of eleven  grandchildren as the most interesting people she knows.