Coming Up June 21, 2010

Last Monday Schoolhouse Green was filled with laughter and fine poetry--and the rain stayed away!

Darren Sardelli, started it off with a series of very funny rhyming poems; Barbara Reiher-Meyers and Peter Dugan treated us to powerful poetry (with Barbara making sure the laughter continued); and Jerry Zezima sent us all home laughing and nodding in recognition with readings from his columns. A fun night.

This Monday we feature four fine author/poets:

George Held

A former professor at Queens College, George Held was a Fulbright lecturer in Czechoslovakia for three years and since 1991 has served on the executive board of The South Fork Natural History Museum, in Bridgehampton. His poems, stories, translations, and book reviews have appeared widely, in such places as Commonweal, Confrontation, New York Quarterly, 5AM, and The Notre Dame Review, and Garrison Keillor read one of George's poems on NPR. He has read from his work at the Amagansett Marine Museum, Canio's Books in Sag Harbor, The Bowery Poetry Club, Cornelia Street Café, and Smalls Jazz Club, among other venues. A five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he has had poems included in two dozen anthologies. His fourteenth collection of poems, After Shakespeare: Selected Sonnets, will be published this fall.

Robert Savino



Robert Savino is a native Long Island poet. His poems have been published widely, in print, from the Long Island Quarterly to the Haight Ashbury Literary Journal.

Robert was a long-standing Board Member of Island Poets; winner of the Lake Ronkonkoma Historical Society's 15th Annual Poetry Competition (2005); and the winner of the 2008 Oberon Poetry Prize.

His books of poetry include the chapbook, fireballs of an illuminated scarecrow (GOOD JAPAN PRESS, 2008) and his first full-length collection Inside a Turtle Shell (Allbook Books, 2009).

Louisa Calio

Louisa Calio is an award winning poet, performer, and photographer. Director of the Poets and Writers Piazza for Hofstra's Italian Experience for the past 9 years, she was Winner of the 1978 Connecticut Commission of the Arts Award to individual Writers, the 1987 Women in Leadership Award, Barbara Jones and Taliesin prizes for Poetry, The New Voices Trinidad and Tobago, and most recently honored at Columbia/ Barnard as a "Feminist who changed America."

Founder of City Spirit Artists, New Haven, Ct., she has spent a life time committed to bringing arts to people of varied economic levels.

Author of In the Eye of Balance, a book of Visionary Poetry that is also a performance, several chapbooks and a novel (in manuscript). Her writings have appeared in anthologies including, Birthed From Scorched Hearts, Women Respond to War, Sisters Singing, I Name Myself Daughter, She is Everywhere, darkmother, Italian Heart/ American Soul, Shades of Black and White, Remembrances, More Sweet Lemons, Northsea Poetry Anthology ,as well as journals and newspapers: VIA, GRADIVA, STUDIA MYSTICA, SALOME, POET'S ON, FEILE -FESTA, JOURNAL OF ITALIAN TRANSLATION, NEW VOICES(TRINIDAD), International Feminist Journal of Politics NEW VERSENEWS and Jamaica's THE GLEANER, OBSERVER, MIRROR.

She has traveled to East and West Africa, lived in the Caribbean and documented her journeys in photographs and the written word, recently completing an epic poem JOURNEY TO THE HEART WATERS which is also an Exhibition of photos with poems that Opened at Round Hill Resort in Montego Bay (Jan.07) AND "A PASSION FOR JAMAICA" also photos and writing that opened at Round Hill in Jan

Doreen Spungin

Doreen Spungin, who writes as Dd. Spungin, taught children with special needs in the New York City Schools. She hosts Poets In Nassau On The Hillside. She has been published in Humanities/Aitia, Asbestos and Brave Hearts, a publication for which she writes a monthly poem. She is involved with the Long Island Poets for Darfur commemorative program anthology.
Her poetry will appear in the forthcoming anthologies: Writing Outside The Lines, Long Island Sounds 2010 and Toward Forgiveness.