Poetry READINGS and EVENTS

The Poetry Center at PCCC offers readings as part of the Distinguished Poets Series. It also hosts readings with poets who have been finalists and winners of contests and awards sponsored by the Center, including The Paterson Poetry Prize and The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. There is an annual reading to celebrate the latest issue of the Paterson Literary Review and for occasional anthologies sponsored by the Center. Many of the readings and workshops offered at The Poetry Center are also featured on Maria Mazziotti Gillan's blog.

The Poetry Center will be holding both virtual readings and in-person events. The Zoom links for virtual events will take you to the live event and later to the archived recording.

Readings begin at 1 PM in the Hamilton Club unless otherwise noted below. (directions to Hamilton Club)

Recent readings from the Poetry Center and archived videos from years past are now available on the Poetry Center at PCCC’s YouTube Channel.

Poetry workshops are conducted by most of the featured poets before their readings. For more information on how to register, see the Workshops page.

~~~~ 2023-2024 Readings ~~~~

11/18/2023 Publication Celebration for Paterson Literary Review #51 (No Workshop)

Join a group of poets published in the latest annual issue of PLR for a reading at 1 pm.
Come early for a reception for the opening of an art exhibit at the same location featuring paintings by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Linda Hillringhouse.

12/2/2023 Nathan McClain & Talena Lachelle Queen

Nathan McClain is the author of two collections of poetry—Previously Owned (2022) and Scale (2017)—both from Four Way Books, a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers Conference, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a graduate from the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Plume Poetry Anthology 10, The Common, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zocalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.

Talena Lachelle Queen, in addition to being Poet Laureate of Paterson, New Jersey, since 2018, is the founder and Executive Director of the Paterson Poetry Festival, now in its fifth year. She is also the founder and president of Word Seed, Inc. a team of literary artists who organize community outreach programs. Her publications include a forthcoming poetry collection How Do I Tell Them (Poets Wear Prada), Soup Can Magazine, the LitFuse Anthology, and When Women Speak (Ed. Ameerah Shabazz-Bilal). A sought-after artist, Queen has performed at many places including the NJ Governor’s Mansion, Hoboken Historical Museum, and NYCMT presents Hip Hop Cypher.

1/13/2024 Jim Reese (ZOOM)

Jim Reese is an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty University in Yankton, South Dakota. Reese’s poetry and prose have been widely published, and he has presented at venues throughout the country, including the Library of Congress and San Quentin Prison. Reese’s awards include a 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award from Mount Marty University, a First Place Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, a Distinguished Achievement Award from Mount Marty University, and a Distinguished Public Service Award in recognition of his exemplary dedication and contributions to the Education Department at Federal Prison Camp Yankton. His books include These Trespasses, ghost on 3rd, and Really Happy! A fourth collection, Dancing Room Only, is forthcoming by New York Quarterly Books (2024). His first book of nonfiction, Bone Chalk, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2019; paperback was released in 2021.

Link for live reading https://youtube.com/live/JPatLY6ICSc?feature=share This will also go to the archived video after the event.

2/3/2024 Poetry Reading by 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards Winners (No Workshop)

An afternoon of contributor readings from winners, honorable mention and editor’s choice poets.
See 2023 Award Winners including Honorable Mentions and Editor’s Choice poems and poets (pdf)

2/17/2024 Suzanne Cleary (ZOOM)

Suzanne Cleary’s most recent poetry books are Crude Angel, published in 2018 by BkMk Press (U of Missouri-Kansas City), and Beauty Mark (BkMk Press 2013). Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her other awards include the John Ciardi Prize, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Troubadour International Poetry Prize (2nd Prize), and fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo. Her poems appear on PBS Newshour.org and PoetryDaily, in anthologies including Best American Poetry and The Forward Book of Poetry 2022, and in journals including The Atlantic, Southern Review, Poetry International, and Poetry London. A member of the Kent & Sussex Poetry Society, she teaches at the Tunbridge Wells Poetry Festival, Tunbridge Wells, UK. She also teaches as Core Faculty in the Converse University MFA in Creative Writing Program and is seeking a publisher for her new book manuscript. Her website is www.suzanneclearypoet.com

Live stream link for the reading https://youtube.com/live/UGxjHN7fO0E?feature=share This will also take you to the archived video later.

3/2/2024 Gabrielle Calvocoressi & Tara Betts

Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi's poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice.  Calvocoressi is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 - 2023.

Dr. Tara Betts is the author of Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and  Arc & Hue. She served as the inaugural Poet for The People Practitioner Fellow at the University of Chicago. Betts currently teaches as a Professor of Practice and Poet in Residence at DePaul University’s Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies Program and serves as poetry editor for The Langston Hughes Review. 

3/16/2024 2023 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award Winner & Finalists Reading and Book Launch (No Workshop)

The winner and finalists for the 2023 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award are all scheduled to read at this event. The winner is Miriam Levine of Concord, NH. Her collection, Forget About Sleep, will be published in Spring 2024 by NYQ Books. The five finalists and their manuscript titles are Emily Hyland, Divorced Business Partners; Nancy Lubarsky, Truth to the Rumors; Stephen S. Mills, We Will Always Be Perverts; Sharon Kennedy-Nolle, Not Waving, and Sean Webb, Disappointment Awaits.

4/6/2024 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize Winners Reading
with Joshua Bennett & Tom Sleigh

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction: Spoken Word: A Cultural History (Knopf, 2023); The Study of Human Life (Penguin, 2022), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize, was longlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and is currently being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios; Owed (Penguin, 2020), a finalist for the New England Book Award; Being Property Once Myself (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize, and The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016), winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award.  Bennett earned his Ph.D. in English from Princeton University, and an M.A. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. He has recited his original works at the Sundance Film Festival, the NAACP Image Awards, and President Obama’s Evening of Poetry and Music at the White House. For his creative writing and scholarship, Joshua has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Alongside his friend and colleague, Jesse McCarthy, he is the founding editor of Minor Notes, a Penguin Classics book series dedicated to minor poets within the black expressive tradition. He lives in Massachusetts with his family. 

Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry including the winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize, The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press, 2018), Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011). His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press, 2018) recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA grant recipient, and winner of numerous awards including the Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, John Updike Award, and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, The Common, and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

5/4/2024 Martín Espada & Chen Chen

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His latest book of poems is Floaters, winner of the 2021 National Book Award and a Massachusetts Book Award, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His website is martinespada.net

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (BOA Editions, 2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry and three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018-2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and currently teaches for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He lives with his partner, Jeff Gilbert, and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.

5/18/2024 Jennifer Poteet (ZOOM)

Jennifer Poteet lives in Montclair, NJ, and works for public radio. She is the author of two chapbooks, Sleepwalking Home (Dancing Girl Press, 2017) and Emily Dickinson’s Selfie (Bottlecap Press, 2023.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Nina Riggs Award nominee. Her full-length collection What Comes Back was a finalist for the inaugural Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award. Jenni fer’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Paterson Literary Review, Swwim, The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Her website is jenniferpoteet.com
Livestream link for the reading https://youtube.com/live/fGmxy1nZTRE?feature=share This will also take you to the archived video later.