The Woodstock Mayapple Writers’ Retreat is almost upon us. Every year the participants in the Retreat present Public Readings around the area. Admission is free to most events and books are available for sale at all events. Credit card payments are accepted for book sales.

Here is the list of events and readers for 2015:

Wednesday, July 22, 7:00 pm
at the Artbar Gallery, 674 Broadway, Kingston. (Map) Free admission
Readers Vincent Cooper, Barbara Diehl, Nola Garrett, Joyce Kessel:

Vincent O. Cooper, who teaches English at the University of the Virgin Islands, has published his original poetry in several international journals such as Kunapipi, Journal of Caribbean Studies, The Caribbean Writer, and many others. He has co- authored poetry collections, including, Three Islands, Tremors, and Tigers in Paradise. Cooper has been a former Fulbright Scholar on Belizean language and culture. He has also published his research on Derek Walcott.

Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of journals, including MacGuffin, Confrontation, Potomac Review (Best of the 50), Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Gargoyle, Rosebud, Superstition Review, Word Riot, Bartleby Snopes, Penduline Press, NANO Fiction, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Thrush Poetry Journal, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.

Nola Garrett is Faculty Emerita of Edinboro University of PA and lives in Pittsburgh, where she writes a monthly blog for Autumn House Press. Her first book, The Dynamite Maker’s Mistress, a collection of 27 sestinas, was published in 2009. Her second poetry book, The Pastor’s Wife Considers Pinball, was published in 2015 by Mayapple Press and received several national reviews. This year, the Mezzo Cammin Women Poet’s Time has posted a critical, biography of Garrett’s work.

Joyce Kessel has published three chapbooks, Secret Lives (2011), Describing the Dark (Saddle Road Press, 2014) and Classroom Quixote: Poems from Four Decades of Teaching Writing and Literature (The Writer’s Den, 2015) – all of which were worked on in previous Mayapple Press sponsored writers’ retreats. Her work has appeared in spitballmag.com, Minor Trips, The Healing Muse, and three Kind of a Hurricane Press’s anthologies. Her work is included in the WNY Peace Center’s anthology Poets Waging Words for Peace and Nickel City Nights anthology. She has been a member of Earth’s Daughters since 1989. She teaches literature, writing, fine arts, and interdisciplinary courses at Villa Maria College where she is Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Department and Director of the Creative Writing and Literature Program. In the past year she has initiated an open writing session for her colleagues at Villa called The Writer’s Block.

Friday, July 24, at 7:30 p.m,
at the Villetta Inn, 3 Upper Byrdcliffe Way, Woodstock (next to Byrdcliffe Theater). (Map) Free admission
Readers: Jim Lonergan, Irene Mitchell, May Kuroiwa

Jim Lonergan writes poetry to balance his legal career. He has workshopped with William Seaton, Ed Sanders and the Millay Society at Steepletop. His poems have appeared in Chronogram, Zephyr, and the Waywayanda Review. His first book of collected poems, Poached Dreams was published in 2010 by Epigraph Press.

Irene Mitchell, a long-time teacher of writing, is the author of Minding the Spectrum’s Business (Future Cycle Press, 2015), A Study of Extremes in Six Suites (Cherry Grove Collections, 2012), and Sea Wind on the White Pillow (Axes Mundi Press, 2009). Formerly poetry editor of Hudson River Art Journal, Mitchell has served as poetry contest juror, and facilitator of poetry workshops. She is known for her collaborations with visual artists and composers.

May Kuroiwa’s grandparents emigrated from Japan to labor on a sugar plantation, where she was born two years before Hawaii became a state. Many of her poems and short stories are grounded in Hawaii’s ancient legends and the complex histories of its people, and have appeared in The Loch Raven Review; Mobius, the Journal of Social Change; and The Gunpowder Review.

Satuday, July 25, at 7:00 p.m.,
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the Catskills, 320 Sawkill Road, Kingston. (Map) NOTE: $5 suggested donation for this event only
Readers: Judith Kerman, Robert McDonough, Helen Ruggieri

Judith Kerman is the founder/coordinator of the Woodstock Mayapple Writers’ Retreat. She has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Galvanic Response (March Street Press), and three books of translations of Cuban and Dominican women’s poetry and fiction (White Pine Press, BOA Editions, Mayapple Press). She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic in 2002. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in Buffalo,.NY (1971 to present) and runs Mayapple Press, located in Woodstock, NY.

Robert E. McDonough taught English at Cuyahoga Community College for more than forty years. He has published one book, No Other World (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), and one chapbook, Greatest Hits (Pudding House), and has been named one of the forty most important Cleveland poets since 1945 in the book Cleveland Poetry Scenes.

Helen Ruggieri has an MFA in poetry writing from Penn State where she studied with John Balaban. She worked with the late William Stafford at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and at annual gatherings in the years following with members of the original workshop. She taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford, PA for 20 years and currently teaches a poetry workshop for the African American Center for Cultural Development in Olean, NY, and coordinates the reading series at the Olean Public Library.

Sunday, July 26, at 3:00 p.m.,
at the Golden Notebook, 29 Tinker Street, Woodstock. (Map) Free admission
Readers: Shannon Frystak, Leslie Gerber, Rosalyn Rossignol, Sarah Sarai

Shannon Frystak is an Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. She is an award winning writer and her first book, Our Minds on Freedom: Women and the Struggle for Black Equality in Louisiana, 1924-1967 was published by Louisiana State University Press in 2009. Her edited collection, with Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Louisiana Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume II will be released by University of Georgia Press later this year.

Leslie Gerber was born in Brooklyn in 1943. He is a music critic, CD publisher, and retired classical record seller. He lives in Woodstock with his wife and dogs. He has been writing poetry since 1999. His first book of poems, Lies of the Poets, was published in late 2014 by Post-Traumatic Press. His second book is scheduled for late 2015 or early 2016.

Rosalyn Rossignol received her PhD from the University of North Carolina and now teaches writing and literature at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas Campus. Rosalyn knew from a very young age, when she preferred nothing in life to reading, that she wanted to be a writer, and so she has practiced that craft most of her life, publishing poetry and short fiction in Sand Hills Literary Magazine, Outlet, Solstice, and The Caribbean Writer. She has also published two books about the 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer A-Z, and A Critical Companion to Chaucer. Her memoir, My Ghost Has a Name: Memoir of a Murder, has been provisionally accepted by the University of South Carolina Press, pending approval by the University Press Board.

Sarah Sarai’s poems are in Ascent, PANK, Threepenny Review, and others; in her collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX); in anthologies and chapbooks. She is contributing editor at The Writing Disorder. She has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College, has taught in college and high school. Sarah lives in N.Y.C. where she works as an editor.