Get Your Irish Up! No Green Beer
Brooklyn Reading Works presents Blarneypalooza, a Celebration of Irish Writing and Fascinations
Thursday, March 17, 2011, 8PM, The Old Stone House
336 3rd Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215/ (718) 768-3195
What exactly is Blarneypalooza? It’s a celebration of Irish writers and influence planned with Saint Patrick’s Day in mind. The following artists will read/perform:
On Larry Honig: An avowed Situationist, this dude is way too old to behave the way he does. He’s wanted in 6 countries and wishes his epitaph to contain a line from the police report: “He was found without pants.”
Lynn McGee’s poems were just published in The New Guard, where one was a finalist and one a semi-finalist in that magazine’s contest judged by former U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Two of her poems are forthcoming in NYC Big City lit, and others have appeared in the Kennesaw Review, Ontario Review, Northwest Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun magazine, Phoebe, Brooklyn Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Southern Anthology, Laurel Review and other journals. Lynn’s poetry chapbook, Bonanza won the Slapering Hol national manuscript contest, she won the In Our Own Write and Judith’s Room Emerging Writers contests in New York City, received a MacDowell fellowship, and earned an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She spent over 15 years working in literacy, and works now as the Internal Writer for a CUNY college.
Barbara O’Dair is a long-time magazine editor and writer who lives with her husband and four children in New Jersey. She graduated from Barnard College with a B.A. in American Studies and from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina with a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry. She has edited two collections of writings, Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship, and Trouble Girls: The Rolling Stone Book of Women in Rock. In 2002, as the editor of Teen People, she instituted a regular poetry column and contest. Currently, as the executive editor for Reader’s Digest, she oversees poetry in the magazine. Her journalism, essays and poetry have been published in many magazines, newspapers, journals and online publications.
Pat Smith’s play Driving Around the House has been produced in theaters around the country and is published by New Rivers Press. He regularly posts new poems on his blog Not in the News Today. Recent work has appeared in the online journal Haggard and Halloo and is soon to be published in Used Furniture Review. He will be curating a Brooklyn Reading Works program in September.
(Native) New York poet Michele Madigan Somerville is the author of Black Irish (2009), a book of verse about being a NYC Irish Catholic, and WISEGAL (2001) a book-length poem. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and she has won a few poetry prizes including a Macarthur Scholarship for Poetry, Honorable Mention in Dublin Ireland’s Davoren Hanna contest (sponsored by Eason Books — judge: Charles Simic), First Place Prize in the 2000 W. B. Yeats Society’s Poetry Competition (judge: Billy Collins). She written about religion for the New York Times, and her essays on religion and education appear regularly on her websites Indie Theology (www.indiethology.com) and Bored-O-Ed (www.bored-o-ed.com) respectively as well as regularly on Huffington Post’s religion and education pages (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michele-somerville).
Michael Sweeney a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, earned his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College and teaches at Fairfield University. In Memory of the Fast Break (Plain View Press, 2008).