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Monday, June 7, 2010 we feature:
Peter Carlaftes
Tom Phelan
Tom Phelan, who was born and raised on a farm in Ireland, is the author of the novels In the Season of the Daisies, Iscariot, Derrycloney, and The Canal Bridge. His next novel, Nailer, about a man determined to get revenge, is set against the backdrop of Ireland's abusive industrial schools and the collusion between church and state that allowed them to flourish.
To date, Tom Phelan has seen his works published in four countries and three languages. His first novel, In the Season of the Daisies, was chosen by Barnes and Noble for its Discover Great New Writers series. His most recent novel, The Canal Bridge, was praised by the Irish Independent as a "First World War masterpiece...ambitious, accomplished, and deeply moving." And Books Ireland called it "powerful and deeply affecting."
In 2008,Tom was selected as a Christopher Isherwood Foundation Fellow, one of only five individuals chosen from among several hundred novelists.
Barbara Ann Branco
Barbara Ann Branca has been writing and performing since childhood. She considers her poetry creative nonfiction based on her lifelong passions for music, history and the natural world. She has read original works on NPR station WSHU and at Cornelia Street Café, Bowery Poetry Club, Poetry Barn and Walt Whitman Birthplace where she took first place in the LI Poetry Collective's Super Poetry Sunday 2010. Born in Brooklyn and reared on Long Island where she made her stage debut at age six, her passion for the environment goes back to the first Earth Day as a science teacher upstate. After teaching college in Vermont and moving to the Upper West Side, she was a science editor and textbook author who hung out in NYC piano bars and jazz clubs landing a one-woman show at Paulsson's (W. 72nd St.) and fronting an orchestra singing jazz standards on a tour of Greece.
Today you can find Barbara Ann at Stony Brook University's New York Sea Grant where she interviews scientists and writes articles on marine environmental issues (www.nyseagrant.org) and has sung with the Big Jazz Band and the Stony Brook Opera Company. Her Sea Grant colleagues have also egged her on to sit in with bands from Anchorage to Hilton Head, from Seattle to Cape Cod. Barbara Ann recently read original poems as she led a tour of Poets' Walk on the Hudson and is currently working on a collection of "watershed"-based poetry. Some of her poetry can be found at http://barbrann.tumblr.com/.
Christine O'Hagan
