03/08/2018
Eleven Connecticut Poets from Edwina Trentham’s Summer Workshop
Will Read At Two Wrasslin’ Cats Coffee House in East Haddam
On Sunday, August 5 from 3:00 to 5:00 PM
For the fourth year, Two Wrasslin’ Cats, East Haddam’s charming and popular Gallery and Café at 374 Town Street (at the junction of Routes 81 and 151) will be the venue for a reading by poets from Edwina Trentham’s annual summer poetry workshop. This year’s workshop, If You Get There Before I Do: Love, Death, and Poetry, is the thirteenth workshop that Trentham has taught in her home in Moodus, and each summer the participants have given a public reading, often in different art galleries. Since 2015, however, when Mark Thiede and Trentham agreed that Two Wrasslin’ Cats would an ideal location to hold the reading, the poets have joyfully gathered to read their work in the community room there, with attendees enjoying fine poetry and refreshments, as well as the chance to sample Thiede’s varied coffee, tea, and hot chocolate offerings and delicious ice cream.
The poets participating in the August 5 reading at Two Wrasslin’ Cats include Patricia Barone, a member of the Connecticut River Poets and a painter who has exhibited extensively, and who also coordinates the Sunday Poetry readings at the Clinton Art Gallery Poetry Place; Barbara Batt, who has been published in Freshwater and Whatever literary journals, and is a member of the Connecticut River Poets; Ariana Buckley, who is a high school English teacher in New Haven, has taught writing at Gateway Community College, and is passionate about people, literature, writing, and art; Suellyn K. Callaghan, who works for a healthcare-related computer software company and began writing poetry in 2016 as a creative outlet to balance her career in health information administration; Carol Chaput, a professional artist (painter, assemblage, drawing) who loves writing poems most of all; Patricia Horn O’Brien, the current Poet Laureate of Old Saybrook, member of the Guilford Poets Guild, and co-founder of CT River Poets, who has a collection of poetry, When Less Than Perfect is Enough, now in its 2nd printing, and recently published a memoir written with her son: The Laughing Rabbit: A Mother, A Son, and the Ties that Bind; Lana Orphanides, who has poetry widely published in journals and an anthology, as well as in a chapbook, Sea and the Sound of Wind, and a collection of poetry, Searching for Angels; novelist and poet, Steven Parlato, who is a Professor of English at Naugatuck Valley Community College, has published poetry in many journals, and also has published two Young Adult novels, The Namesake (Merit Press, 2013) and The Precious Dreadful (Simon Pulse, 2018); Elizabeth Possidente, who worked as a Creative Arts Therapist, is a member of the Guilford Poets Guild, sings with the American Baroque Chorus, and has happily returned to poetry after many years; Edwina Trentham, who taught English and creative writing for twenty-seven years at Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield, Connecticut, where she founded the national poetry journal, Freshwater, and whose work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, as well as in her poetry collection, Stumbling into the Light; and Allison Zaczynski, an award winning poet, who is Head of Afterschool and a Classroom Aide at Pioneer Valley Montessori School in Springfield, and also teaches yoga and Zumba.
Refreshments will be served, and the reading is free and open to the public. Copies of the poets’ books will be on sale. For more information, contact Edwina Trentham at 860-873-1472/trentham@comcast.net or Two Wrasslin’ Cats Coffee House 860-891-8446.
