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2007 EVENTS |
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| December |
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Lev, who was born in New York City in 1936, attended Hunter College, worked in the wire rooms of the Daily News and the New York Times, and then drove a taxi cab for 20 years (with a six-year hiatus in which he ran messages for, and contributed poetry to, The Village Voice and operated the Home Planet Bookshop on the Lower East Side). His earliest poems appeared in print in 1958, and he started his first small press magazine, HYN Anthology, in 1969. The most recent of the 13 collections of his poetry, Yesterday's News, was published in 2002 by Red Hill Outloudbooks, in Claryville. A chapbook, Grief, will be published by Bard Press/Ten Penny Players, in Staten Island, in the fall and should be available at the end of October. His brief underground film-acting career pinnacled with his portrayal (he wrote his own lines) of "The Poet" in Robert Downey Sr.'s 1969 classic Putney Swope. He and his reclusive cat Kit Smart live in High Falls, where he spends most of his time publishing the literary tabloid Home Planet News, which he and his late wife Enid Dame founded in 1979. Yacullo has played the piano and composed music since the age of five. He has been a classical accompanist, church organist, laborer, and special educator. He has performed and recorded music with classical and original rock and jazz ensembles (SeLah, Joe Montini, and Joe Lentine) and currently performs all over the United States with Potential Unlimited, a troupe of exceptionally talented musicians who have developmental disabilities. Yacullo also performs with The Princes of Serendip, a musical threesome based in Woodstock, since 1995. The readings will be hosted by area poet Bob Wright. There is a suggested donation of $3. For additional information, Mr. Wright can be contacted at 518-444-4561. |
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| July | ||||||||||||||||||||
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| June | ||||||||||||||||||||
THREE RARE, EARLY HOUSES OPEN TO THE PUBLIC FOR THE FIRST TIME IN YEARS Celebrate Old Home Week with a tour of homes in Athens, a lunchtime concert in the park and a photography sale. Fete the Evarts Library on its centennial and watch as the Athens Cultural Center helps recreates the Old Home Week parade up Main Street. Saturday, June 30th To help the Evarts Library celebrate its centennial, the Athens Cultural Center has joined forces to stage a celebration replete with house tours, parades, exhibits, old time music and old-fashioned children's games. This revives the first Old Home Week celebration which was started 100 years ago, in conjunction with the laying of the cornerstone of the Evarts Library. In the way that only the village of Athens can do, we're recreating this slice of Americana on Saturday, June 30th. The centerpiece of our celebration is a tour of homes in the village including three major, early houses that have not been open to the public in at least 50 years and an exhibition at the Cultural Center highlighting the library centennial and the celebration of Old Home Week in Athens. The Greene County Camera Club will host a photography sale at the Cultural Center. The Evarts Library will host a centennial celebration on its lawn. Babe Ruth Little League and APAC will help host a lunchtime concert in the Riverfront Park. We'll all parade up Main Street together. So come out to Athens and help us fete the library as it turns 100.
Old Home Week Parade: 12:45 PM The parade route runs up Second Street from the Riverfront Park to the Evarts Library. The Athens Fire Department will pull their 19th century fire wagon, library trustees will ride in a horse-drawn carriage and classic cars will carry local dignitaries to the reviewing stand. Not since Norman Rockwell have you seen anything this quaint. Lunchtime Concert in the Park: 12-1 PM The Saints of Swing brass band and the Dented Fenders barbershop quartet give a lunchtime concert in the gazebo in the Athens Riverfront Park. Have some lunch while you listen to old time music and watch the Hudson River meander by. Evarts Library Centennial Celebration: 1-3 PM
Photography sale and show 10 AM to 4 PM The Greene County Camera Club mounts a sale of photographs by its members during all the festivities at the Athens Cultural Center. While you wait to purchase tickets to the home tour, you can take home a modern Hudson River school masterpiece by one of the Camera Club members. You can also view the ongoing exhibition "Many Eyes, Many Views" at the Athens Cultural Center featuring works by the Camera Club. The Old Home Week celebration is a joint production of the Athens Cultural Center, the Evarts Library, the Athens Performing Arts Committee and the Athens Babe Ruth League. Funding for this event was provided by the Athens Community Trust, the National Bank of Coxsackie and Marshall and Sterling Insurance. Celebrate Flag Day with the Athens Cultural Center Join us for a night of fireworks, jazz, barbecue, Hollywood gift bags and the opening reception of our next show Saturday, June 9th, from 6 to 10 PM One Night Only... On Saturday, June 9th, the Athens Cultural Center will celebrate Flag Day with an event-packed evening that starts with art and our annual raffle of Hollywood awards show gift bags and ends with jazz and fireworks in the Athens Riverfront Park.
9:45 PM Finish your Flag Day with a patriotic burst of fireworks over the Hudson River. Hudson shoots them off but we have the better view from the Athens Riverfront Park. You decide which set off more sparks, the jazz, the art or the fireworks. The Flag Day celebration is a joint production of the Athens Cultural Center, the Hudson/Athens Flag Day Committee, the Athens Performing Arts Committee and the Athens Babe Ruth League. Funding for this event was provided by the Athens Community Trust and the Bank of Coxsackie. |
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| April |
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| Poetry on the Hudson: Poetry reading by Alan Catlin and Matthew Spireng open mike following Saturday, April 21st, 2 p.m. Suggested donation $3 Hosted by Bob Wright For more information, call 518-444-4561 Alan Catlin has been publishing in the "little and not-so-little" magazines and journals since the middle 70's, primarily as a poet. Up till now he has been published in hundreds of places, amassing enough file cards representing published work to fill two and half file card boxes. His first chapbook appeared in 1980, and dozens have followed in the last twenty-five years. Three of those were winners of national competitions. A fourth was first runner-up and was also printed. Another dozen or so have been finalists in competitions over the years. In addition to the many chapbooks, he has four full-length books to his credit, ranging from the now-long-out-of-print Animal Acts, which was hailed as the “Most Neglected Book of 1984” by legendary Wormwood Review editor Marvin Malone. A collaboration with Paul Weinman called Barred on Both Sides received that same accolade several years later. More recent books include Drunk and Disorderly, from Pavement Saw Press; The Schenectady Chainsaw Massacre, from Staplegun Press; and Playing Tennis with Antonioni, from March Street Press, which also published his chapbook Stop Making Sense. Over the years his work has received 17 Pushcart prize nominations—13 for poetry, and four for fiction. Although he does not write science-fiction poetry per se, he has received three Rhysling Award nominations for best science-fiction poems of the year. Book manuscripts of his have been finalists in several national competitions, including those for The Brittingham Award (University of Wisconsin Press), The Lena Miles Wever Award (Pleiades Press/LSU Press), and the Quercus Review Press. He has also published reviews, over a hundred short stories, and had a column named after his submission to William Safire's On Language column in the New York Times. Stories of his have been in Slipstream and The Literary Review and have made regular appearances in the irregular NYC magazine, Happy, once ranked 13 in the market for short stories by Writer's Digest. Currently he is working on another volume in his Killer Drink series five of which have been published and a sixth accepted. He is also at work on an extended sequence of self-portraits with artists, which may or may not be actual self portraits. Last year he wrote the first volume of a fictional memoir about his years spent in hotel and restaurant management, called Chaos Management. The second volume of memoirs will contain linked stories all of which are set in the same three hours, in a bar, over a number of years; it is titled Hours of Happiness. He is currently enjoying his recent retirement from the unchosen profession of barman. Matthew Spireng's full-length book manuscript Out of Body won the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award and was published in 2006 by Bluestem Press at Emporia State University. His chapbook Young Farmer is due out in 2007 from Finishing Line Press. Previous chapbooks were Encounters, 2005, by Finishing Line Press; Inspiration Point, 2002, the winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Just This, 2003, by Hampden-Sydney College. The title poem of Inspiration Point refers to the lookout by the same name on the escarpment in Greene County. Spireng's individual poems have won two national awards and been recognized in numerous other national contests. He has also received two Pushchart Prize nominations. Since 1990 nearly 500 of his poems have appeared in publications across the United States, including The American Scholar, Yankee Magazine, Southern Humanities Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, English Journal, and Louisiana Literature. He is also an award-winning journalist. Spireng lives in Lomontville in Ulster County in the house in which he was raised on the wooded acreage left from the family farm. |
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| March | ||||||||||||||||||||
Poetry on the Hudson: Poetry reading by Mike Jurkovic and Cheryl Rice Open mike following Saturday, March 24th, 2 p.m. Suggested donation $3 Hosted by Bob Wright For more information, call 518-444-4561  Mike Jurkovic is currently co-director of the
Calling All Poets Reading Series in Beacon, New York, and the founder
and host of the annual Hudson Valley Poets Fest, held in Rosendale, New
York, since 2003. He was also the founder and host of the Voices
of the Valley Poetry Performance Series, whose events took place in
various venues from 1996 through 2002. He regularly contributes
CD music reviews to Chronogram and the Folk and Acoustic Music website,
and his column, The Rock ‘n Roll Curmudgeon, appeared in Rhythm and
News Magazine from1997 to 2004.His poems have appeared in The South Carolina Review, The Comstock Review, The Baltimore Review, the Meridian Anthology, Heaven Bone, DrumVoices Revue, Eclipse, Carquinez Poetry Review, Haight Ashbury Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Hunger, Epicenter Magazine, Bear Creek Haiku, Salvage, Chronogram, the Hudson Valley Literary Magazine, the Literary Gazette, Medicinal Purposes, and The Country and Abroad. Online on the Internet, his poems have appeared on Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, NewPaltzNation.com, and Recursive Angel. He has three poetry CDs: Lean On Me: A Hudson Valley Christmas (Drezdon, 1998) and the self-produced Guided by Anxiety and Clapping Is Not Mandatory. His work appears in two national anthologies: Will Work For Peace (Zeropanik,1999) and Dyed-In-The-Wool: A Hudson River Poetry Anthology (Vivisphere,2001). Mike lives in Walkill, New York.  Cheryl Rice, who was born on Long Island and
currently lives in Kingston, has been writing for more years than she
can remember. She has had both poems and prose published in such
periodicals as Bitterroot, Oxalis, Satori, Chronogram, Poets Gallery
Press, Poetry Motel, Chronogram, The Country and Abroad, The
Florida Review, The Gathering of the Tribes, Home Planet Planet News,
Mangrove, Other: -----, The
Temple/El Templo, Ulster Magazine, and The Woodstock Times, and online
at albanypoets.org, poetrypoetry.com., and thehiddencity.com. She
has read from her works on several local cable-TV shows, including
Marist College=s Media Center, and was a co-host of ACatskill Caravan,@
a Woodstock cable-TV show devoted to the arts. She was the host
of a weekly poetry open mike at Rip=s Cafe, in Saugerties, and for many
years hosted an annual February event, known as the ASylvia Plath
Bak-Off,@ at the A.I.R. Studio Gallery, in Kingston. She has
lived in New York's Hudson Valley for more than 25 years. |
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