Past Poetry Readings
2002-2003

Gertrude Halstead, born in Germany during World War I, fled to France during Hitler's regime, then fled to America during the German invasion of France in World War II.  Her poetry has been published in New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts since moving here with her husband to be closer to their two daughters. Her strong focus is on the written and spoken word, nature, music and the importance of people of all ages in her life.  According to the Poetry Oasis web site, Gertrude is a  long-time participant of John Hodgen's poetry workshop who writes in a style both minimalist and full.  The term Halsteading - to denote white space in a poem - has been coined by the group to describe Gertrude's brilliant use of negative space.
 
 

These days, Susan Roney-O’Brien is an extremely busy person. She teaches English to one hundred 7th and 8th graders, runs a writing program one afternoon a week, tutors, edits the student literary magazine, works to publish the writings of talented eighth graders in book form each year, is a reading editor for The Worcester Review and writes, when at all possible.

March 14, 2003

Laurie Robertson-Lorant   is the author of MELVILLE:  A BIOGRAPHY, the only up-to-date, full-length,  fully-annotated, complete, one-volume biography of Melville, now available  in a UMass paperback edition.

    A graduate of Radcliffe College/Harvard University with an M. A. and Ph. D.  at New York University, Dr. Robertson-Lorant  is currently teaching at UMass Dartmouth and MIT.  She began writing poetry in 1986 in Ruth Whitman's Radcliffe Seminar.   Since then, she has been a Contributor in Poetry at the Breadloaf Writers' conference and a Writing Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf in Germany.

    Selections from her Melville persona poems, THE MAN WHO LIVED AMONG THE CANNIBALS, and others of her poems have appeared in the Radcliffe Quarterly, The American Voice, The Worcester Review, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The South Coast Poetry Journal, Sandscript, The North American Review, Rockhurst Review, Leviathan, Igitur (Naples) and other publications.

    Her play "Good Mother, Farewell", a one-act play on the friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and "Mumbet" (Elizabeth Freeman), the slave who ended slavery in Massachusetts, has been performed by actors from  Shakespeare & Company and the People's Players of Salem State College.

    Web page for the Melville Biography is http://www.geocities.com/melvillebio/melville.htm

Student Poets from the Assumption College Phoenix , Spring 2003 issue.

·    Jennifer Ryan '05
·    Jeff Lavery '05
·    Sara Campbell '04
·    Matt Bavone '06
·    Shelly Bryan '04
·    Kristina England '03

February 21, 2003
Lea Graham is an Adjunct Professor of English at Assumption College.  She received her B.A. from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago.  In 2000, Lea was awarded second place in the Worcester County Annual Poetry Contest.  She is fluent in Spanish and has worked as an ESL Instructor. 

Mike Land is an assistant professor of English at Assumption College. Originally a newspaperman from Alabama, he earned his masters and doctorate in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, emphasizing Creative Writing and American literature. At Assumption Mike specializes -- or generalizes -- in journalism, nature writing, American literature, and film.

Even though he is writing this in October of 2002, he is fairly confident that at the time of his reading four months later, his book-in-progress, Travel in Dog Years, will still be in progress. In his spare time Mike enjoys walking his dog Cal, watching baseball, basketball, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, most of all, writing about himself in third person.
 
 
 

November 15, 2002
Craig Nelson was a member of the 1997 Providence and 2001 Boston Cantab Slam teams.  He has
featured, workshopped and slammed throughout New England.  A native of Rhode Island, Craig is
presently surviving (survival being a relative term) as a poet in Worcester, MA.  His style of poetry might
be described as humor with a point.

Jim Lang’s creative nonfiction and reviews have appeared in Worcester Magazine, Notre Dame Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune.  He writes a regular column of personal essays about academic life for the online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Those essays appear five times per year under the title of “The Tenure-Track Diaries,” and are accessible here: http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/firstperson/lang.htm .

His first nonfiction book, Learning Sickness: A Year with Crohn’s Disease , chronicles a year in which he spent learning what it meant specifically to live with chronic illness, but more generally to live with a physical self in an imperfect world.  The book has two structuring principles: it follows the chronological trajectory of a year spent becoming ill and then returning to health; it offers a series of “lessons” that the experience of illness taught to him.  He completed the book in the summer of 2002, and was offered a contract to represent the book by literary agent Sandra Choron of March Tenth, Inc.  She is currently submitting the book to commercial publishers.  To preview the book, go to: http://www.learningsickness.com/

He is currently at work on his second book, another work of narrative nonfiction about doubt and religious faith.

An assistant professor of English at Assumption College, Jim Lang’s regular schedule of courses includes seminars in contemporary British and world literature, as well as a writing workshop in creative nonfiction.  He lives in Worcester with his wife and three daughters.

Author of In My Father’s House, winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas, and Bread Without Sorrow (2001) from Lynx House Press, Spokane, Washington.

Included in anthologies Witness and Wait: Thirteen Poets From New England and Something Understood (Every Other Thursday Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, 1996); We Teach Them All: Teachers Writing About Diversity (Massachusetts Field Center for Teaching and Learning: Stenhouse Publishers, York, Maine, 1996); Bone Cages (Haley Press, Athol, MA, 1996), and Scattered Leaves: A Collection of Celebrated Poets (New England Association of Teachers of English, 2000), and Stubborn Light: The Best of The Sun Volume III, Chapel Hill, NC, 2000).

Won the Grolier Prize in Poetry in 1980 and an Arvon Foundation Award (Kensington, England) in 1981. Won a Yankee Magazine Award for poetry in 1982 and was one of five finalists in the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Program. Winner first prize in 1993 Red Brick Review poetry competition, Manchester, N.H. Winner Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award in Poetry, 2000. Winner 2001 Emily Dickinson Award, Universities West Press, Flagstaff, AZ.

Ralph Hughes
Ralph Hughes started out in electronics, shifted briefly to philosophy after WWll, then taught Latin and English at Worcester Academy.  Now, in addition to helping his wife tend sheep, he works at learning to make music via the cello. His attempt to make music via poetry started more than twenty years ago under the inspiration and  tutelage of David Williams, Chris Gilbert, Sam Cornish, Cheryl Savageau, and these days, John Hodgen.

Hughes's poems have appeared in Sahara and Diner and were featured in an issue of The Worcester Review after he had won the first prize in the annual contest of the Worcester County Poetry Association.

An essay entitled "The Narrative Structure of Barry Hannah's 'Water Liars,'" which began with an assignment Thoreen
developed for an Assumption Honors course in Introduction to Literature, is slated for publication next year in Mississippi
Quarterly.  Another essay, entitled "The Fourth Amendment and Other Modern Inconveniences: Undeclared War, Organized
Labor, and the Abrogation of Civil Rights in Vineland" is to be included in Pynchon's Embodiments: Tales Beyond the
Rainbow's End, forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Photo by Tom St. John.

Dan Lewis earns his living as a technical writer and lives his earning reading and writing poetry. In 1999 he was a finalist in the Worcester County Poetry Association contest, judged by Wesley McNair. He has published in Worcester Review, Sahara, Diner, Worcester Magazine, and Eclectica, and is currently engaged in casting his bread upon the waters of the wider world.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Page last updated: August 26, 2003