Caffe Lena Poetry Festival 2009

	Caffe Lena Poetry Festival 2009 Saturday, Apr 11 Starts at noon and runs through the evening

Biographies

Miriam Axel-Lute
Miriam Axel-Lute (www.mjoy.org) is a performance-oriented poet who writes about politics, religion, sex, love, urban living and the human condition. She loves giving people who didn't like poetry in high school a different experience of the genre.
Her work has been published in various journals, including The Ledge and the Paterson Literary Review, and anthologies including You Are Here: New York City's Streets in Poetry and Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society. She was a finalist in the 2000 Allen Ginsburg Awards. Miriam has given featured readings at venues from pulpits to bookstores to living rooms all over the Northeast, and has two chapbooks, Souls Like Mockingbirds and Packing to Stay.

Alan Catlin
Alan Catlin was a bartender for thirty-four years before retiring to work on his fictional memoirs under the working title Chaos Management. His work in bars also informed his recent collection Suffering Bastards, winner for the fifth and last Evil Genius Chapbook Contest.
He’s published several collections of poems related to art, including chapbooks on Turner, Our Lady of the Shipwrecks (Finishing Line Press), The Impressionists, Effects of Sunlight on Fog (Bright Hill Press) and more extreme art forms in chapbooks Self-Portrait of the Artist Afraid of His Self-Portrait (March Street Press) and Men in Suits (Madman Ink). Two poems from Alan’s collection The Effects of Sunlight in the Fog have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Cara Benson
Cara Benson's book of poems, (made), is forthcoming from BookThug. She is guest curator for the Belladonna Elders Series with Jayne Cortez and Anne Waldman. Her poem "perhaps the festivities are what they seem" and a conversation with Anne Waldman called "Welcome to the Anthropocene" are forthcoming in the book for the event.
Benson edits the online text and art journal Sous Rature (www.necessetics.com/ sousrature.html) and EDNA, the print journal of The Millay Colony for the Arts. Her chapbook, Quantum Chaos and Poems: A Manifest(o)ation, co-won the bpNichol Prize.
Benson teaches poetry every Tuesday at Mt. McGregor Correctional Facility.

Joseph Bruchac
Joseph Bruchac draws on the Adirondacks, where he lives, and on his Native American heritage (Abenaki) for storytelling and writing. His poems, articles and stories have appeared in more than 500 publications, from American Poetry Review to Smithsonian magazine.
He has written more than 70 books for adults and children, including his latest, March Toward the Thunder (Penguin/Dial, 2008). His honors include a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship for Poetry, the Cherokee National Prose Award, the Knickerbocker Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas.
He has taught creative writing at Skidmore College, Columbia University, and Hamilton College, as well as teaching poetry workshops on Indian reservations, in prisons, schools, libraries, and at writing conferences.

Lyn Lifshin
Lyn Lifshin's poetry appears in almost every literary and poetry magazine, from American Scholar, Christian Science Monitor and Yankee to Ms., Rolling Stone and Ploughshares. She has edited 4 anthologies of women's writing including Tangled Vines (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) now in its second enlarged edition and chosen by Ms. magazine as one of the 60 best books of the year.
Forthcoming books include a book about the courageous and riveting race horse, Barbaro: Beyond Brokenness from Texas Review Press, Nutley Pond from Goose River Press, Lost in the Fog from Finishing Line Press, Persephone from Red Hen. She is a poet of substance, range and invention with writers as diverse as Robert Frost, Ken Kesey, Richard Eberhart, and Ed Sanders having praised her work.

Michael Brown
Michael R. Brown, author of four books of poetry, was the founding Boston slam master. Now living in Robbinston, Maine, he and his partner Valerie Lawson host a monthly reading and publish the poetry quarterly Off the Coast.
Brown reports for the local newspaper, works in theater, and is writing a book on American education.

Barbara Ungar
Barbara Louise Ungar is an Associate Professor at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY, where she has taught poetry, literature, and the performance of literature for twelve years.
She has read widely in NYC, upstate NY, and further afield. Her most recent poetry collection, The Origin of the Milky Way, won the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award, and several other awards, including the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Book of Poetry 2007.
She is also the author of Thrift, and the chapbooks Sequel and Neoclassical Barbra, as well as Haiku In English. Further information is available at www.barbaraungar.com.

Nancy White
Nancy White’s first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won the Washington Prize for poetry. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Diner, FIELD, Harpur Palate, New Letters, New England Review, Rattle, and many others.
She works as associate editor at The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and teaches at Adirondack Community College.

M. Miriam Herrera
M. Miriam Herrera is a graduate of the Program for Writers (MA) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and has published poems in New Millennium Writings, Nimrod, Blue Mesa Review, Albatross, Earth's Daughters, and Southwestern American Literature. Her new chapbook, Kaddish for Columbus, is available from Finishing Line Press.
Miriam has taught creative writing and Chicano/Latino Literature at University of Illinois, University of New Mexico, and Russell Sage College. She has lived in the Midwest, Southwest, and Israel, and today makes a home with her mathematician husband in Malta, New York. Miriam is on the Board of Directors of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild and serves as their Webmaster.

Steven Huff
Steve Huff is the author of two books of poetry, The Water We Came From (2003) and More Daring Escapes (2008), and a collection of stories, A Pig in Paris (2008).
He teaches at RIT and in the Pine Manor College low residency MFA program, and is director of adult education at the Writers & Books literary center in Rochester, NY.

Jordan Smith
Jordan Smith is the author of five books of poems, the two most recent from the University of Tampa Press: For Appearances and The Names of Things Are Leaving. He recently completed a new collection, The Light in the Film.
The recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenhiem Memorial Foundation, he is chair of the Department of English at Union College.

Bernadette Mayer
One of the most eminent experimental poets of our time, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A most prolific poet, her first book was published at the age of twenty-three. Many texts later she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New York, her latest publication being Poetry State Forest (New Directions).
For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she was the Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project from 1980-1984. Bernadette Mayer has received grants and awards from PEN American Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the NEA, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.