Planet Poet - Words in Space

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired March 11th, 2025) featuring Ulster County Poet Laureate, performance artist and President of CAPS (Calling All Poets), Mike Jurkovic.  Mike reads from his latest work and discusses exciting developments at CAPS now entering its 26th year in the Hudson Valley.  Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce appears later in the show for an extended conversation.

Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com Visit: https://www.mikejurkovic.com, 

Visit: https://www.callingallpoets.net.  Visit:  https://www.pamelampearce.com

 2025 Ulster County Poet Laureate, Mike Jurkovic’s poetry, prose and music reviews have been published globally with little reportable income. Full length collections include Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers,AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2023, 2022, 2020); haiku collections Monet’s Bamboo (CAPS Press, 2025) Blue Fan Whirring, (Nirala Press, 2018). President, Calling All Poets, now in its 26th year in the Hudson Valley. 2016 Pushcart nominee, CD reviews appear online at All About Jazz and lightwoodpress.com  He is the Monday 9am-10:30am host of NuJazzXcursions, WVKR-91.3FM Vassar College.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired February 11th, 2025) featuring poet Tina Barry on her spellbinding new book, I Tell Henrietta.  Kristin Flynn, the artist who created the intense, expressive cover and interior art for I Tell Henrietta also joins us on the show.  Visit:Tina Barry at Tina Barry writer and  Kristin Flynn at https://www.kristinflynn.art   

Praise for I Tell Henrietta

"Tina Barry's astonishing collection I Tell Henrietta explores thresholds between the dream world and wakefulness and between poetry and prose... "
---- Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

"Tina Barry's startling and eclectic I Tell Henrietta pushes the hybrid aesthetic envelope forward....Suffused with astute observation, memory and crystalline imagery, Barry's collection is a must-read for those who love small works containing multitudes"
----  Nathan Leslie, editor of Best Small Fictions, author of Hurry Up and Relax


Tina Barry is a textile designer turned poet, short-fiction writer and editor. She is the author of I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024) with art by Kristin Flynn, Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2019 and 2016).Her writing can be found in Rattle, Verse Daily, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, SWWIM, The Indianapolis Review, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, and elsewhere. Tina has five Pushcart Prize nominations and several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.
 
Kristin Flynn earned a BFA in fashion design from Parsons School of Design, an AAS degree in Textiles from Rochester Institute of Technology, and studied painting at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows, including the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, Stone Ridge Center for the Arts, Jane Street Gallery Studio 89, Brick Gallery, Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bard College. 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired December 17th, 2024) featuring Bruce Weber and Jan Alexander.  Bruce is the producer and Jan is the coordinator of “Whirlwind” The 2025 Hudson Valley New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza.  Bruce and Jan will tell us about this great event and read from their writings. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Whirlwind at The Local

 “Whirlwind” The 2025 Hudson Valley New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, will take place Wednesday, January 1st, 2025 from 1:00-7:00 pm at The Local, 16 John Street, Saugerties.  Admission is free.  Wine and beer will be available for purchase.

 Bruce and Jan and the “Whirlwind” organizers/staff will gratefully accept donations of books, new and used, fiction and nonfiction, hardcover and paperback for the Greene Correctional Facility in Greene County, New York and non-perishable food, beverages, toothbrushes or toothpaste for the Saugerties Food Pantry, which provides food for nearly 250 men, women and children in the area each month.

 Bruce Weber is a poet and historian of American art. His poetry has been published widely in magazines both in print and online, and he is the author of six books of poetry, including These Poems Are Not Pretty (with Jan McLaughlin), How the Poem Died, The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot, Poetic Justice, The Breakup of My First Marriage, and most recently, There Are Too Many Words in My House (Rogue Scholars Press, 2019). For twenty-five years he organized the Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza in New York City. Upon settling in Saugerties in the Hudson Valley he moved the event where it will be held next year at The Local in Saugerties with the support of the Saugerties Arts Commission. Currently he and his wife Joanne curate the multidisciplinary series Dialogues for the Ear & Eye on the first Tuesday evening of the month at the 9W Diner in Saugerties.

 Jan Alexander is the author of the novel Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization (Regal House Publishing, Sept. 2019), a fractured utopian tale that was a Leap Frog Fiction Prize semi-finalist. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and literary magazines including Atticus Review, Everyday Fiction, Flash Fiction, Guernica, Silver Birch Press, and 34th Parallel. Her flash fiction stories have received two honorable mentions and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She has written about business and travel for many publications and taught Chinese history at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of Getting to Lamma, a novel, and co-author of Bad Girls of the Silver Screen, a look at Hollywood’s portrayal of prostitutes through the ages.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired October 22nd, 2024) featuring award-winning poet Janet Kaplan who will explore the theme of “Chaos and Creativity” in her poetry. Her work has earned praise from poets and critics including Dan Beachy Quick and Adrienne Rich. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Janet Kaplan Ecotones.  

 Janet Kaplan’s full-length poetry books are Ecotones (2022; shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and published by The Black Spring Press Group Ltd., London), Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (2011 Sandeen Prizewinner from the University of Notre Dame Press), The Glazier’s Country (2003 Poets Out Loud Prizewinner from Fordham University Press), and The Groundnote (1998, Alice James Books). Her collection & then is forthcoming from PB&J Books. Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, fellowships and residencies from the VCCA, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, (An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Firewheel Editions, 2007; Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James, Alice James Books, 2012; and Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers, 2017). She has served as Poet in Residence at Fordham University and as a member of the undergraduate and graduate creative writing faculty at Hofstra University, where she edited the digital literary magazine AMP. 

Praise for Ecotones:

"The personal. The citational. The chronicle. All the “conquistadorial spillage….” In Ecotones, Janet Kaplan pieces these verging environs. The writing is transitional; contemplative. We are reminded everywhere of how edges touch, how language is code. The poet has flipped the surface of the page to better show us a map of our disconsolate displacements. “Motion is the translation of a body from the place it occupies to another place,” writes Euler; Janet Kaplan: “and I, bit player, confessor-chronicler, / will write it.”  "- Edric Mesmer, author of Fawning and series editor of Among the Neighbors

Praise for Dreamlife of a Philanthropist

“…The poems here hover above their own titles, this dreamlife of the poem more important than the poem itself, a place in which thinking is not yet thought, intent not yet conclusive, not language even as a form of life, but language in the process of making that life possible.  It isn’t a mental life; it’s too real for that easy confine.  Let’s just call it the necessary life – a life of serious play.”  - Dan Beachy-Quick

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 10th, 2024) featuring poet, writer and historian Bill Birns.  Bill brings his great knowledge of Catskills history and his deep affinity with Ralph Waldo Emerson to the show and reads from his work-in-progress The Cooper Shop. 

 Bill Birns was honored to be named one of 50 Stewards of the Catskills by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, on the occasion of the Center’s 50th birthday. A citizen of Delaware County, for over 50 years, Bill has long been active in the community. 

 Bill is the author of the recently re-released A Catskill Catalog, available from Purple Mountain Press (nysbooks.com); I Was Corning a Beaver Like You Do: Joe Hewitt, John Burroughs, Mountain Culture (John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge & Mountain Arts Media); and two books of locally-focused verse: The Myth in the Mountain and Fleischmanns in Verse.

            A Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Linguistics, Bill taught a couple generations of Catskill Mountain kids at Margaretville Central School and Onteora High School. He lives in Fleischmanns with wife, Gayla, and dog, Murray Wagner.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August 13th, 2024) featuring Bruce McPherson, the founding Director of the award-winning McPherson & Co.- a Literary and Arts Publishing Company, who will present and read from his compelling and award-winning catalog of books.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s intrepid Poet-at-Large, joins us later in the program. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit McPherson & Co  Visit: Pamela Manche Pearce

 Here’s some information about Bruce McPherson and McPherson & Co.

 In 1974, Bruce McPherson founded McPherson & Company, an independent literary and arts publishing house in Providence, Rhode Island.  He relocated the press three years later to Kingston, N.Y. in the Hudson Valley.  McPherson & Company has been a full-time project since 1984, and has issued roughly 150 editions of more than 100 titles by authors from around the country and around the world. The press specializes in four areas: contemporary fiction (mostly American authors), great “lost” literary works from the Twentieth Century (our Recovered Classics series), non-fiction books dealing with contemporary art, film, aesthetics, and related cultural issues (often presented under the Documentext imprint), and, finally, translations of distinguished works by authors of Italian, Spanish, French, and German fiction and non-fiction.  

 McPherson & Co. was named ForeWord Reviews’ 2010 Independent Publisher of the Year. The press has won numerous other awards including Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Lord Nose Award 2017; NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Fiction 2010: Lord of Misrule; the Bronze IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards) Visionary Fiction Prize 2023: Headless World; the Bronze IPPY Literary Fiction Prize 2017: Renato After Alba; Ohioana Prize Finalist 2016: This Earth You'll Come Back To; And, for the novel Sea of Hooks  - the Gold IPPY Literary Fiction Prize 2015 and the PEN CENTER USA Fiction Award 2014.  Sea of Hooks was also CHAUTAUQUA Prize Finalist 2014 and was listed as one of the top 10 books of the year in New York Magazine and Publishers Weekly).    

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July 30th, 2024) featuring returning guest - the remarkable poet, teacher and editor, Geoffrey Nutter, who’ll read from his work and share with us his erudition and passion about the Haiku form.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s intrepid Poet-at-Large is also featured on the show.  Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit: Geoffrey Nutter Wallson Glass Visit: Pamela Manche Pearce

 Geoffrey Nutter is originally from Sacramento, California, but has lived in New York City for many years. He is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water’s Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He has taught poetry at several schools, including Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School; and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City, where he conducts day-long writing sessions for people from all over the world, and also does private consultations.

 from Wave Books on Giant Moth Perishes:
With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter’s sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. Here are poems that teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July 16th, 2024) featuring award-winning poet and President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets, Ricardo Maldonado.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large, is also featured on the show. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. 

Visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets and https://poets.org/poet/ricardo-alberto-maldonado.  Visit:  https://www.pamelampearce.com

 Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. A graduate of Tufts and Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he is the author of The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, one of Remezcla’s Best Books by Latina or Latin American Authors, and Silver Medalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award. He is also the translator of Dinapier DiDonato’s Colaterales/ Collateral (National Poetry Series / Akashic Books, 2013) and coeditor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a bilingual anthology that raised funds for grassroots recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. 

Maldonado is the Academy of American Poets' President and Executive Director. Previously, he served as the co-director of 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo, Queer|Art|Mentorship, and the T. S. Eliot and Hawthornden foundations.

 Praise for The Life Assignment

 Lynn Melnick… Complex and unblinking, with heaps of sorrow and grace, Maldonado has a knack for the impossible, and for making his readers look headlong into it until we all come out the other side more compassionate and honest.

 Emily Skillings… This bilingual collection asks us to consider how we as readers and citizens reconcile self and state, body and landscape, desire and capital, language and communication . . .

 Urayoan Noel-The Life Assignment is, in its own startling terms, an ecology of late capitalist grief… This outstanding first book, merciless in its beauty and wit, is a ‘schema for our lapsed world,’ a way to make sense of our ‘somber city’ and ‘the grief / we happen to be around.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired June 4th, 2024) featuring the founding members of PRP (Poets Read Poetry) who have gathered together to read and discuss the wildly expressive poetry of 19th century poet Francis Saltus Saltus.  Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Francis Saltus Saltus

Pamela  Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s own Poet-At-Large,  began PRP in her Garrison, New York living room in 2010 with a simple idea: to have poets gather and discuss the poems of other poets based on a pre-determined theme followed by a shop talk discussion of the members’ own writing lives. Poets Jo Pitkin, Andrew Acciaro and Frank Ortega joined Pamela to form the original group which disbanded in 2014, and was revived on Zoom in the summer of 2021, when Sharon Israel was invited to become the fifth member.

The members of PRP:

Andrew Acciaro
Li Po sailed the Yangzi
Shelley had his Spezia
Blake his Felpham
Cyrano the Moon
Andrew supine
On the supple banks of the river that flows both ways…
Has his poet’s panache and Blarney kissed plume…

Andrew lives in Peekskill, N.Y.

 Frank Ortega
“As a seeker of wisdom and peace, following those paths in life and art,my work is often about race, poverty and oppression--until we have erased them.What I take in becomes my work, those messages we send to each other,
always trying to make this a better world”.   Frank now resides near Boulder, Colorado.  https://artlitlab.org/artists/frank-ortega

Pushcart Prize nominee, Pamela Manché Pearce is the author of the poetry chapbook, WIDOWLAND (Green Bottle Press, London) and the co-author of THE CHARLES STREET TRIO: A Novel in Three Voices (Daisy H Productions) both of which are available on Amazon. The Poet-at-Large on WIOX’s Planet Poet-Words in Space is on Instagram at #pamelamanchepearceNYC.  Pamela lives in Manhattan.

A Hudson Valley native, Jo Pitkin is the author of a chapbook and four full-length poetry collections. She works as a freelance educational writer creating English language arts materials for K through 12 students and is a teaching artist with The Poetry Barn.  Jo lives in Cold Spring N.Y. www.jopitkin.com

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired May 7th, 2024) featuring teacher, editor, poet and writer, Nancy Merritt Bell.  How do you teach young children to write poetry?  Nancy shares her methods and also reads from works she has edited and written specifically for children.  The show also features Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large, who brings us Natasha Trethewey’s Bellocq’s Ophelia.

 Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. 

 Nancy Merritt Bell is the great-great-great- grand-niece of the poet Christopher Smart, and also a writer, book editor and poet.  Nancy grew up in the 60’s in Athens, Greece, and Tucson, Arizona and then moved to Toronto, Canada.  Her two beatnik parents didn't allow her to watch TV, so what better to do but read? Everyone had to recite poems by heart on birthdays and special events, and long car rides – which was often as Canada is a big country and all car rides are long. This came in handy when Nancy studied epic poetry at the University of Toronto and did graduate work at New York University. Nancy underwrote her academic career by successfully working in development on a dozen TV series, including the Emmy-winning Anne of Avonlea, The Odyssey and Degrassi, and writing as many plays, such as The Mean Time at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2006, Nancy edited William Loizeaux’s prize-winning kids’ book WINGS! After moving to Brooklyn, Nancy went on to edit 20 books, including four by her husband, author Michael McKinley, with the most recent one, Diamond Dust, coming out in July. Nancy is currently editing the collected works of the poet Callum Tichenor, and also a collection of children’s poetry by Sara Fymme, as well as Sara’s chapter book for kids in verse, Invisible Isabel.