Please join us in kicking off our sixth season on Thursday, October 4, 2012 at 7:00pm, when we’ll host poets Patrick Donnelly and Jean Valentine. Mocha Maya’s Coffee House, 47 Bridge St, Shelburne Falls, MA. ($2-5 suggested donation)

Patrick Donnelly

Patrick Donnelly is the author of The Charge (Ausable Press, 2003, since 2009 part of Copper Canyon Press) and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2012). With Stephen D. Miller, Donnelly is co-translator of the 141 Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period, a scholarly history and analysis forthcoming from Cornell East Asia Series.

Donnelly is director of the Advanced Seminar, one of three summer programs at The Frost Place, a poetry conference center at Robert Frost’s old homestead in Franconia, NH. He has taught creative writing and public speaking at Colby College and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. In fall 2012, he’ll teach “Reading Contemporary Poetry” at Smith College, and in spring 2013 will be Visiting Assistant Professor at George Washington University. He is an Interdisciplinary Advisor in Poetry for the Lesley University MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has also taught with the summer residencies of the MFA programs of Pine Manor College and Lesley University. Donnelly is a 2008 recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a member of the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project Advisory Board.

He lives in South Deerfield, Massachusetts with his spouse Stephen D. Miller.

Jean Valentine (Photo credit: Max Greenstreet)

Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2010. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 – 2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. 

Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000.

She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.