Event
Riverwood Poetry Series
The series takes place in person on the second Wednesday of the month from September 2024 through May 2025. Each night typically begins with a poetry reading featuring regionally or nationally known poets, followed by an open mic featuring readers with one poem (one page).
Authors’ books will be available to buy for book signing and conversation. Food and drinks will be available for purchase.
This monthly event is free of charge. Ample parking is available via the 56 Arbor parking lot.
On Wednesday, February 12, at 7 PM, Riverwood Poetry Series @ Real Art Ways will host two married couples as we celebrate Valentine’s Day: Denise Abercrombie & Jonathan Andersen and Margot Schilpp & Jeff Mock.
There will not be an open mic this month, so each couple can have a full half hour for their poetry.
About Riverwood Poetry Series
The Riverwood Poetry Series, Inc. is a non-profit arts organization committed to promoting and appreciating poetry in Connecticut. RPS, Inc. is invested in providing entertaining and thought-provoking programming while responding to the needs of our neighbors through community outreach and collaboration.
From their Facebook page: “The Riverwood Poetry Series has innovated many programs since our inception, all free to the public. We provide entertaining and thought-provoking poetry in a relaxed atmosphere.”
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Denise Abercrombie’s work has appeared in Minnesota Review, Fireweed, Connecticut Review, Phoebe: Journal of Feminist Scholarship, Theory, and Aesthetics, The Lumberyard: A Radio Magazine, Struggle, Writing on the Edge, Yale Global Health Review, English Journal, Blue Collar Review, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, Earth’s Daughters and elsewhere. She helps coordinate Curbstone Foundation’s Poetry in the Julia de Burgos Park series in Willimantic. Denise teaches theater at E.O. Smith High School and lives in Storrs, Connecticut.
Jonathan Andersen’s two full-length collections of poems are Augur, awarded the David Martinson-Meadowhawk Poetry Prize by Red Dragonfly Press in Minnesota and published in 2018, and Stomp and Sing, published by Curbstone Press in 2005. He is also the editor of the anthology Seeds of Fire: Contemporary Poetry from the U.S.A. (Smokestack Books – UK, 2008). His poems have appeared in various periodicals, including Hanging Loose, New American Writing, Nimrod International Journal, North American Review, The Progressive, Rattle, and Salt, among others. For twelve years, he was a high school English and special education teacher. Since 2008, he has been a professor of English at Connecticut State Community College – Quinebaug Valley in Danielson and Willimantic.
Margot Schilpp teaches at Southern Connecticut State University and Quinnipiac University. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, all from Carnegie Mellon University Press, the most recent of which is Afterswarm, winner of the 2020 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry. She lives in New Haven with her husband, the poet Jeff Mock, and their two daughters, Paula and Leah.
Jeff Mock is the author of Ruthless. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, New England Review, The North American Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He directs the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with his wife, Margot Schilpp, and their daughters, Paula and Leah.
