Massachusetts Statewide Poetry Calendar

Featured student poet Lola Bennett is a freshman at New Heights Charter School in Brockton. She loves to write because it makes her feel free. "I can write about something I have never done before or something that doesn't exist, when I am writing no rules apply."

Featured poet Nancy Brady Cunningham is a published poet and author of four books of non-fiction. She also co-edited, with Jack Scully, "The Book Of Arrows" by poet Mike Amado. She has won both the Barbara Bradley and the Gretchen Warren awards from the New England Poetry Club. Thirteen of her poems were included in "Unlocking the Poem" by Ottone M. Riccio and Ellen Beth Siegal. Nancy and drummer Mike Morin formed "the Poetry and Percussion Duo" and perform Southeaster Mass. She is a student of yoga, and has taught yoga and meditation classes for decades.

There will be an open mic & light refreshments will be served.

Rich Youmans’s narrative poetry has appeared in the Cape Cod Times, Cape Cod Poetry Review, and the Paterson Literary Review, among other publications, and his haiku, haibun, and related essays have been published internationally. Currently editor-in-chief of Contemporary Haibun Online, he has published a collection of linked haibun with Margaret Chula, Shadow Lines, which won a Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America, as well as two individual haibun collections, All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2015) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). Bob Lucky, in a review of Head-On, wrote, “There’s not one haibun in this chapbook that couldn’t be used to teach a master class.”

Alice Kociemba is the author of Bourne Bridge (Turning Point, 2016) and the chapbook, Death of Teaticket Hardware, the title poem of which won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Alice was Guest Editor of Common Threads, the poetry discussion project of Mass Poetry (2015 & 2016) and for the past ten years has led a poetry discussion group at the Falmouth Public Library. She is the founding director of Calliope: Poetry for Community and hosts “Poetic License,” a monthly open mic at FCTV.

Alice and Rich met through Calliope—and the rest, as they say is history. They now live in North Falmouth and are currently, along with Robin Smith-Johnson, editing an anthology titled From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod and the Islands Through Poetry; it will be published later this year by Bass River Press, an imprint of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod.