GREAT AMERICAN POETS DAY CELEBRATION

Exhibit runs April 22nd, Noon – 5pm

ELIZABETH BISHOP,
ALICE QUINN,
ROBERT BENSEN,
TOM TRAVISANO,
BERTHA ROGERS,
CHRISTINE GELINEAU

Price of Admission: $3

Free to guests 18 and under, and students.

EXHIBIT HOURS:

Monday: 10 – 4

Tuesday: 10 – 4

Wednesday: 9 – 12

Exhibit available to view every second Thursday of each month during Word Thursday Readings: 7 – 9PM

Weekends by appointment.

ROBERT BENSEN, ONEONTA, NY POET Robert Bensen, Oneonta, NY, has published his been published in the U.S., U.K., West Indies, Asia, and in African-American and Native American journals. His books, published in collaboration with artists, include Scriptures of Venus (with Hyde Meissner, Swamp Press), Day Labor (with Phil Young, Serpent & Eagle Press), Two Dancers (with Charles Bremer, Woodland Arts), and Orenoque, Wetumka, and Other Poems (with Phil Young, Bright Hill Press). His poetry has earned poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 1996 Robert Penn Warren Award. He has written numerous essays on Caribbean and Native American literature, and edited several anthologies of those literatures, most recently Children of the Dragonfly (University of Arizona Press). His dance poetry has been shown in five exhibitions with photographs by Charles Bremer, in galleries that include the Word & Image Gallery at Bright Hill Literary Center and the National Museum of Dance, Saratoga Springs, NY. He is an invited member of the WordCraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers. He directs the writing programs at Hartwick College, Oneonta, NY.

EVA DAVIDSON, ONEONTA, NY POET EVA DAVIDSON first trained as a violinist and attended Walnut Hill School of the Performing Arts and the New England Conservatory. She received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied violin, completed the writing program, and won the Academy of American Poets College Prize in 1983. She went on to earn a Masters of Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College Program for Writers, where she studied with Joan Aleshire, Greg Orr, Lisel Mueller, and Ellen Bryant Voigt. Ms. Davidson has collaborated with her sister, composer Tina Davidson, on song cycles, on choral pieces, and as the lyricist on three commissioned operas-Billie and Zelda, Summer of the Swans, and Pearl. Their work has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, Harvard University, Musica International Festival, The Curtis Institute, and Adirondack Festival of American Music. Davidson resides in upstate Oneonta, New York and teaches creative writing at Hartwick College. Most recently she has been completing three manuscripts of poems, including Soon it will be Dark, and Dawn Birds, while serving as Program Coordinator for Literacy Volunteers of Otsego and Delaware Counties.

TOM TRAVISANO, ONEONTA, NY WRITER & SCHOLAR Thomas Travisano, Oneonta, is Professor of English at Hartwick College. He is the founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society and the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (1988), the first critical monograph on Bishop’s career. Travisano is the author of Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman (1999). He is the principal editor of the internationally acclaimed Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (2008), and co-editor of the three volume New Anthology of American Poetry. Travisano was awarded a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship for a new critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop, which will be published by Penguin Random House.

CHRISTINE GELINEAU is the author of three full-length books of poetry, most recently CRAVE (2016, NYQ Books). Other books include the book-length sequence APPETITE FOR THE DIVINE, published as the Editor’s Choice for the Robert McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, 2010 and REMORSELESS LOYALTY, winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, also from Ashland Poetry Press, 2006. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau’s poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, New York Times, Connecticut Review, New Letters, Green Mountains Review, Florida Review and others. Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University, where she is Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program and coordinator of the Readers’ Series. She also teaches in the low-residency graduate writing program at Wilkes University. Gelineau lives on a farm in the Susquehanna River valley where she and her husband raise Morgan horses under the Hartland prefix.