Please check out my Events Page here, especially if you are not too far from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley or Berks County. I will be participating in two quite different poetry events during the second week of September.

The first event presents the culmination of a years-long project of collaboration between educators/writers/photographers Hernán Pereira, Pamela Daza, and Lucia Ramos in Iquique, Chile and Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. There will be a gallery of photographs in the library at Albright and a celebration of the book’s publication the evening of September 11. Arturo Prat University and Albright College have been able to sponsor this project through a competitive teaching innovation project. The book’s title: So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapaca & Pennsylvania.

The anthology presents poets from both Chile’s Atacama Desert region (Tarapaca) and Pennsylvania’s eastern/northeastern counties. Interviews with the poets provide insightful mini-biographies and are accompanied by wonderful photographs. Here’s mine:

photo by H. Periera

I have previewed the book, through the magic of .pdf files, and found it fascinating to read about the backgrounds of these writers, their writing processes, their creative influences.

The Pennsylvania writers include some colleagues I have known for awhile, yet the editors’/authors’ choice of inquiries and the settings of the photographs evoke aspects of these writers that inform and delight. It should be an interesting evening, and the public is invited.

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The second event takes place in Bethlehem, PA at Godfrey Daniels–a listening room/coffeehouse in the American Folk tradition. Dave Fry, folk troubadour extraordinaire, hosts a monthly “Dave’s Night Out” concert there at 7 pm on Sundays. Most of the time these events feature singers and musicians; but Dave branches out to storytellers and, on Sunday the 14th, to poets Daniel Notaro (author of Limn the Mask) and me.

We’ll be reading from our work and conversing with one another, with Dave, and with the audience. $10.50 at the door.