Guilford Poets Guild

Join us on March 14th for an evening celebrating Mark McGuire-Schwartz as he assumes the post of Guilford’s Poet Laureate! McGuire-Schwartz will be our new Poet Laureate as Gordon Whiteman passes the torch in a celebration at the Guilford Public Library on March 14th. Join us to applaud Gordon Whiteman for his remarkable tenure as Town Poet Laureate and to usher in the talented Mark McGuire-Schwartz to that illustrious post!

The Guilford Poets Guild presents Poets Mark McGuire-Schwartz and Gordon Whiteman for their Second Thursday Poetry Series event on Thursday, March 14th at 6:30pm. The event will begin with an Open Mic and then move into a shared evening of poetry from McGuire-Schwartz and Whiteman.

Mark McGuire-Schwartz believes that laughter is a gift to be shared. He has published poetry and prose in many journals, including Caduceus, Fairfield Review, RogueScholars, Bent Pin Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, 6 Sentences, Whatever Literary Magazine, Connecticut Law Journal, and on the bottoms of rocks.  His first chapbook, Loss and Laughs, Love and Fauna, was published in 2009. Mark is author of a short play, Meeting Arthur Miller, which was produced as part of the Short and NEAT program during the 2004 International Festival of Arts and Ideas and he has authored many other poems, plays and books. He received his MFA from Southern Connecticut State University and has taught at Housatonic Community College among other posts. Join us on the 14th for more stories and information about both Mark McGuire-Schwartz and Gordon Whiteman!

Hello!

There is a change in this evening’s event; Jenny Munro is unable to perform tonight.

We hope to hear her another time soon!

Instead The Guilford Poets Guild is holding an informal poetry reading and gathering this evening.

We look forward to seeing everyone who can join us for snacks, sips and seasonal poems at 6:30pm at Guilford Free Library.

To register for this exciting event on Thursday, December 14th please visit https://guilfordfreelibrary.org/events/event/guilford-poets-guild-jenny-munro/

Join us on December 14th to hear Charles Dickens’ timeless classic, A Christmas Carol, in Jennifer Munro’s dramatic, delightful and thoroughly English interpretation! The evening will begin at 6:30pm at The Guilford Library. Please register for this event here.

Jenny Munro’s Bio: As a child growing up in a large working-class family in in the English Midlands, Jennifer fell in love with the spoken word.  Every Sunday, a cast of rogues, ne’er-do-wells, raconteurs, and heroes gathered around the family’s old wooden table to tell stories, share secrets, and gossip.  Their tales are the inspiration for Jennifer’s extensive repertoire of stories.  Poignant, funny, and profoundly moving, they are carefully crafted narratives that resonate with the frailty and courage of the human spirit.  However, what really sets Jennifer’s stories apart is the precision of her language and vividly dawn images.  Greg Weiss, storyteller, educator, and actor said her stories are “. . . filled with bulls, bicycles, buckets of fish and other wonder tokens of childhood and growing up.  Jennifer Munro takes [us] to that place, just beyond the watchful, if not winking, eye of authority and introduces an assortment of characters, some endearing, some dangerous, all captivating . . . Her language transports us to locales and circumstances that would be familiar to Dickens, Twain, and even J.K. Rowling.”

In 2016, Parkhurst Brothers published a collection of her short stories, called Aunty Lily and Other Delightfully Perverse Stories, which can be purchased directly from the publisher or from Amazon. 

A Circle of Excellence Award winner, she has received numerous awards both for her contributions to storytelling, her CDs, and collection of short stories.  She has performed at festivals internationally and across the nation and regularly presents workshops on the art and practice of storytelling. 

With her partner Denise Keyes Page, she has co-produced a series of shows called Women Tell: Our Stories Through the Decades.  Women are invited to tell stories that have been shaped by the economic, social, or political conditions of selected decades.  The result has been an amazing collection of true stories about issues women have faced and continue to face.

Join Guilford Poets Guild for our Second Thursday Poetry Reading on November 9th to hear Charles Douthat at the Guilford Free Library!

We’ll have an Open Mic from 6:30-7pm and then hear our featured poet until 8pm.

To register for this IN-PERSON event, please visit: https://guilfordfreelibrary.org/upcoming-events/

Charles is a poet, retired litigator and visual artist.  A third generation Californian, he attended Stanford University and Hastings College of the Law in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Since 1980 he’s lived in Connecticut where he practiced trial law and was honored with membership in Best Lawyers in America.  He began writing poems and painting during a long, mid-life illness. Since then his poems have been published in many magazines and journals, including Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and his paintings have been widely exhibited.  Charles’ book Blue for Oceans was awarded the 2011 PEN New England Award as the best book of poetry published that year by a New England author.  In 2019 he received an MFA in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College.  Charles’ son Ross is an author and columnist for the New York Times.  His daughter Jeanne is a film producer at Made Up Stories, a production company in Los Angeles.  He lives in a small town in Connecticut and is married to the artist, Julie Leff.

Join us for a weekend of play readings involving Guilford Poets Guild Members!

Saturday, October 14 at 2 PM at Guilford Free Library, Moses Gunn Play Company Presents BOX AND COX, a Staged Reading by John Morton. Featuring: MARION GITTLEMAN, NORMAN ALLEN & GPG Members GWEN GUNN and NORMAN MARSHALL

Sunday, October 15th at 12:30PM at Shoreline Unitarian Universalist Society, 297 Boston Post Rd, Madison, CT, The Playwrights Circle Presents “Write On” A Festival of Short Plays featuring the work of Shoreline Playwrights including a new one-act play by GPG Member JULIE FITZPATRICK.

Join the Guilford Poets Guild to hear Poet Lee Jacobus on Thursday October 12th at Guilford Library from 6:30-8pm! We’ll start with an Open Mic from 6:30-7pm and then listen to Lee’s work from 7-8pm.

We look forward to seeing you!

Lee’s Bio is here: I was born in East Orange, New Jersey, in 1935, and went to public schools, graduating from Millburn High School. I went to Brown University on a Lackawanna Brown Scholarship and majored in English and American Literature. After a brief fling in heavy industry in Philadelphia, I returned to Brown for an MA in English. I taught at the Mary Wheeler School for a year, while my wife Joanna finished her degree at the Rhode Island School of Design. We then moved to Danbury, Connecticut, in 1960 where I taught for 6 years at Western Connecticut State University. I won a Danforth Teachers Grant to get my Ph.D. in 1966 and in 1968, degree in hand, I joined the English Department at the University of Connecticut. My specialties were John Milton and other 17th century writers — and James Joyce and Modern Irish Literature. I am a member of the Milton Society and the Northeast Milton Seminar as well as the International James Joyce Society. I am also a member of the Authors Guild and the Dramatists Guild as well as the Modern Language Association. I retired from the University of Connecticut on January 1, 2001. Joanna taught dance at the University of Connecticut and Eastern Connecticut State University. We have two children, Sharon Jacobus Benzenhoefer (1958-2009) and James D. Jacobus. I maintain a strong interest in life drawing, photography, and playing the piano and drums, all of which I do in part to inform me in my work in writing about the arts.

The Guilford Poets Guild invites you to join us for a wonderful kickoff to our fall programing with Poet Maureen Owen (pictured here with her granddaughters and their furry friends) presenting for us on ZOOM. This meeting will take place virtually at the Zoom address below. There will be an Open Mic from 6:30-7pm and Maureen will share her work from 7-8pm. We look forward to “seeing” you there!

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7746376275 Meeting ID: 774 637 6275

Maureen Owen Bio:
Maureen Owen’s title, let the heart hold down the breakage  Or  the caregiver’s log, is just out from Hanging Loose Press.  And hot off the press is Poets on the Road, a collaborative reading tour blog in print, with Barbara Henning from City Point Press. Other recent books include Edges of Water from Chax Press and Erosion’s Pull, a Coffee House Press title that was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her collection American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award.  She has most recently published work in Three Fold, Dispatches, Positive Magnets, Hurricane Review, The Denver Quarterly, Blazing Stadium, The Brooklyn Rail, The Cafe Review and Posit. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website. 

GPG Member Julie Fitzpatrick publishes play, “77 U-Turn” with Next Stage Press. To order your copy, visit here. The synopsis of the play is as follows: It’s the winter of 2017. Recently divorced and raising her child alone in the town in which she grew up, our main character, Julie, has returned to her hometown of Guilford. Upon the mysterious visit of a stranger on a snowy night, Julie is prompted to return to her childhood home. After some misgivings, she does so and it is in that place that she experiences flashbacks to her beloved brother’s fall into the grasp of mental illness. Poetic, touching, and honest, 77 U-Turn is about turning back, parenting, love, loss, confusion and what happens when we look behind us before moving forward.