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, January 8, at 7 PM, we will host Witness Stones Project poets Marilyn Nelson, Kate Rushin, Rhonda Ward, and Antoinette Brim-Bell.
About the Witness Stones:
Between 1670 and 1826, at least 300 enslaved and indentured African Americans and Native Americans labored in the historic town of Lyme. Today, Witness Stones honors the humanity and the contributions of vital members of the Old Lyme community. The bronze plaques that mark sites of enslavement on Lyme Street restore forgotten history and serve as memorials to those once held here in bondage. A growing number of Connecticut towns, including Guilford, Madison, Greenwich, Suffield, and West Hartford has collaborated with the Witness Stones Project to install small plaques in their communities commemorating enslaved individuals. Through research, education, and civic engagement, the Project expands the understanding of local history and honors the humanity and contributions of those formerly bonded. Its research-based curriculum materials engage students of different age groups in history, civics, and language arts classes with inquiry-based learning. Dennis Culliton, the retired Guilford teacher who established the Witness Stones Project, modeled the effort on the Stolpersteine Project in Berlin, which commemorates those persecuted by the Nazis before and during WWII.
Marilyn Nelson is the author and translator of twenty poetry books and chapbooks for adults, young adults, and children. Her collections have won awards, and her poems have been widely anthologized. Nelson’s honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship (in the South of France!), a
fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Ruth Lilly Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Wallace Stevens Award. She has served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, as Poet-in-Residence of the Poets Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and as the Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut. The mother of two and grandmother of two, she lives quietly, retired from a long academic career, with her daughter and three cats.
Kate Rushin is the author of The Black Back-Ups and “The Bridge Poem. She holds an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Cave Canem [Cah-vey Cah-nem] Foundation. Her work is included in the anthology, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and online on the websites of The Poetry Foundation and the American Academy of Poets. She is Professor of English and Poet in Residence at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut.
Rhonda M. Ward served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for the City of New London from 2017 to 2021. Her poems have appeared most recently in Connecticut Woodlands, Cape Cod Quarterly, and online at the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Project. She cohosts the annual Langston Hughes Community Poetry Reading, and she is the webmaster and publicist for the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Connecticut.
Antoinette Brim-Bell, Connecticut’s 8th State Poet Laureate, is the author of three full-length poetry collections: These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love, and Psalm of the Sunflower. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, as well as in Poetry Magazine and Poem-a-Day. Brim-Bell has also published critical works, “The Myopic Eye in Alice Walker’s ‘Flowers’” (Critical Insights: Alice Walker, Salem Press) and “Juxtaposed Dichotomies: the idealized white suburban pastoral, the surrealist tableau of Black Poverty & the Women in between” (The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent, Haymarket Books). Brim-Bell has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for both poetry and essay. She is a Cave Canem Foundation Fellow and an alum of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA).
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.”
