The Poetry Reading Group (L-R) Andrew Acciaro, Pamela Manché Pearce, Frank Ortega and Jo Pitkin

A reading and discussion

Does anyone read poetry anymore? How much time do any of us spend in the same room with other people just talking? Poets Read Poetry has a new take on these eternal pleasures. Each month, this quartet of local writers, Andrew Acciaro, Frank Ortega, Pamela Manché Pearce and Jo Pitkin, will gather to read aloud and discuss poems—from classic to contemporary—on intriguing themes such as Poems That Made Us Poets, Poems We Can’t Let Go Of and Poems that Make Us Nervous. The first reading of the series will be from 6-8 p.m. on Nov. 7 at the BeanRunner Café. The evening’s theme is Poets on Artists: A Secret Love. Three simple steps for creating your own isolation-breaking, culturally-nourishing “poetry pod” will be revealed.

Andrew Acciaro works as an independent used and rare bookseller. Acciaro writes poetry and reads and performs his work, hosting literary events at venues following the river that flows both ways the mighty Hudson. Of his two mistresses Poetry and Art, Poetry remains his most wickedly faithful. He is a member of Poets Read Poetry.

Jo Pitkin earned an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her poems are published in Little Star, Nimrod, Quarterly West, Stone Canoe, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of The Measure (Finishing Line Press) and the forthcoming Commonplace Invasions (Salmon Poetry, Ireland).

Frank Ortega has had work published in over 15 literary journals, as well as by Lost Horse Press in “I Go to the Ruined Place”, an anthology of human rights poetry. He has been awarded writing residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Edward F. Albee Foundation, Karolyi Foundation (France), Dorland Mountain Colony and Millay Colony for the Arts, and a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. In March he was awarded a fellowship to attend the annual poetry conference at The Frost Place in New Hampshire in 2011. Ortega has just been published by the British literary journal BRAND. As well, another of Ortega’s other work has been selected as a finalist for the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize and appears in their latest issue.

The event is free and open to the public. The BeanRunner Café is located at 201 S. Division Street, in Peekskill. For more information, call 914-737-1701 or visit www.beanrunnercafe.com.
Photo courtesy of F. Ortega

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