Camden County
Cultural & Heritage Commission
Poetry page, featuring interviews of local poets
arts.camden.lib.nj.us
Eadon’s Place
Produced by Linda DiFeterici & keith roach
www.eadonsplace.com/
Local
Lit
A resource of Philadelphia area literary news, author appearances, and
book signings
www.locallit.com
We hope you enjoyed the Fifth Annual Collingswood Book Festival. See you on October 4, 2008 for the Sixth Annual Collingswood Book Festival.
10:00 – 10:30am: Therése Halscheid
Recent Finalist Award recipient of the Paterson Poetry Book Prize for Uncommon Geography.
10:45am - 11:15am: David Tucker
Winner of the 2005 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry for Late for Work
11:30am - NOON: Darcy Cummings
Darcy Cummings, winner of the Bright Hills Press book competition for The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer's Life.
12:15pm - 12:45pm: Elaine Terranova
Named a Pew Fellow in the Arts for 2006 and author of NOT TO: New and Selected Poems.
1:00pm - 3:00pm: Book Fest Poetry Slam
& Open Mic Hosted by Linda DiFeterici.
All day: 2nd Annual Book Festival Poem and 'Sages
through the Ages' readings.
More about the authors and events:
2nd Annual Book Festival Poem
Festival-goers had the opportunity to help create the 2nd Annual Collingswood Book Festival Poem by contributing a line to the verse on the giant poster board on Haddon Avenue. Click here to read the poem.
Book Fest Poetry Slam & Open Mic
hosted by Linda DiFeterici
We are pleased to announce that Linda DiFeterici, initiator of poetry readings, festivals, and slams in southern New Jersey and Philadelphia will return to host this year’s poetry slam. Poets wishing to compete in the slam can sign up in the poetry tent on Haddon Avenue during the Festival. First, second, and third place prizes will be awarded, including an annual membership to Cavalcade of Poets and Independent Artists. There will be open mic sessions throughout the slam, so poets not competing are welcome to bring their original poetry to share.
DiFeterici and her partner Keith Roach recently launched “Eadon’s Place,” an internet broadcast of uncensored and multi-language poetry, spokenword and music of all genres. They air readers, performance poets, and spokenword artists with or without musical accompaniment from all over the world. More information about Eadon’s Place and Cavalcade of Poets and Independent Artists can be found at www.eadonsplace.com and www.cpia-online.com
Darcy Cumming’s poems have appeared in journals in the United States and England, including Poetry Northwest, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Carolina Quarterly, Negative Capability, Timber Creek Review, Natural Bridge, and Runes. Her chapbook, Singing A Mass For The Dead, was published in 1996. Her book, The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer's Life won the Bright Hills Press book competition, and was published in September 2006. Cummings is a graduate of Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), the University of Pennsylvania, and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has received fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. She teaches writing for the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, for the New Jersey Writers Project, and for the Visual Poetry Program of The Public Arts Project at Rutgers University in Camden.
Cummings will be reading from The Artist As Alice: From A Photographer's Life and a manuscript she is currently working on about growing up in Camden and Trenton, N.J.
Therése Halscheid is author of three poetry collections: Powertalk (1995), Without Home (Kells, 2001) and Uncommon Geography (Carpenter Gothic, 2006). Uncommon Geography recently received a Finalist Award for the Paterson Poetry Book Prize.
She was awarded a 2003 Fellowship for poetry from New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her poetry has received awards as well as three nominations for the Pushcart Prize. Her writings - poetry and prose - have appeared in numerous magazines.
She teaches creative writing in varied settings, including Atlantic Cape Community College, New Jersey, as well as being a visiting writer in schools for NJ State Council on the Arts. In 2007, she had a poet residency in Homer, Alaska.
For the past decade, the author has been house-sitting, while traveling widely to write. This mobility, along with simple living, has helped her to sustain her writing life. Many poems chronicle her travels across varied terrain, beginning with local settings, then moving to sacred environments as far as New Mexico and beyond including South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, and the Ural Mountains of Russia, where she has taught. In June 2005, she received a Dodge Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center.
For more information about her books and to see samples of her poetry and photography of travels on the road, please visit www.ThereseHalscheid.com
Therese will read from her latest book Uncommon Geography, poetry that depicts her lifestyle of writing on the road, at the Collingswood Book Festival.
Elaine Terranova was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts for 2006. Her most recent book of poems is NOT TO: New and Selected Poems. Other books include The Cult of the Right Hand, for which she won the 1990 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Damages (Copper Canyon Press, 1996), and The Dog's Heart (Orchises Press, 2002). Her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis is part of the Penn Greek Drama Series and was produced at the University of Kansas in 2002. She received an NEA fellowship and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships for her poetry. She has been Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College, a Fellow at Bread Loaf and a winner of the Judah Magnus Museum's Anna Davidson Rosenberg prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Prairie Schooner, The American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Antioch Review, and other magazines and appeared in various anthologies including Sixty Years of American Poetry, The Gift of Tongues, and Blood to Remember: American Poets Write About the Holocaust.
David Tucker is winner of the 2005 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry, judged by Philip Levine. Assistant managing editor of the New Jersey Star-Ledger metro section, he has also been a reporter and editor at the Toronto Star and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Tucker studied poetry with Donald Hall and Robert Hayden and is a graduate of the University of Michigan. He has been writing Late for Work throughout his twenty-eight-year career at top city newspapers. In his poems he follows reporters hustling for stories and captures the beauty of everyday life, lived between breaking headlines.
The Collingswood Book Festival Poem
The rain was gently falling while we walked through town
leaves slick under wet sneakers and hands wrapped ‘round a steamy cup o’ joe.
The warm shades of changing leaves cut through the cool air
as I searched in vain for donuts, trying to thaw out my big toe.
Lost on the avenue without my umbrella and muse,
ducked in a store to look and browse
but look, way out there—clouds break, sun so fair
I dodged a clothes rack and strolled out of the store
pleasantly pondering why the cold did not wait a bit more.
Then in the distance a wondrous glow did appear; my old, weary body started to warm.
In medieval climes, supplicants bent backed, over the sacred—
the almighty book!
opened to be finished with its pages inked
telling us of who would ever think
a community could pull together to create a story of independent thoughts loosely linked
with soft petals of loving humanity
and the soft grass tickling my bare toes.
We’re not here to complain—the rain
we’re here for the books, not my looks.
My pets make me happy when they play
my pets are words that dance
words that run without collars and bark romance.
Open a good book and you’ll have good thoughts
my favorite food is rhyming stew
my soul in singing
as words swirl round my tongue.
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yum, this page was delicious
I got lost, way laid and stressed, but found Camille and all was saved
inside or out this festival is the rave
reading is where you want to go
if you like to read the Collingswood Book Festival is where you want to go.
Don’t forget the Collingswood Panther reads too.
Collingswood is the place you want to read.
How ‘bout a Butterfinger®?
And God created the little town that could
then went and named it Collingswood
