March 20, 2021 @ 7PM
Salem Atheneum - online
salemathenaeum.net/event/give-voice-poetry-in-response-to-the-salem-witch-trials-1692/?instance_id=13058

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, James R. Scrimgeour and Cindy Veach read from work that gives voice to the victims of the Salem Witch Trials.

The Salem Witch Trials remain a source of fascination and horror, as well as a reminder of the dangers of intolerance, fear, and mob mentality. The Salem Athenaeum, partnering with the Peabody Essex Museum in conjunction with its current exhibition, The Salem Witch Trials 1692, presents an evening of poetry responding to this resonant and dark era in our colonial history. Join us and hear award-winning poets Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, James R. Scrimgeour, and Cindy Veach read from their work that gives voice to the victims of this time. Dan Lipcan, the Ann C. Pingree Director of the Phillips Library at PEM, will provide a brief overview of the exhibition.

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, a poet and novelist from Vilches, Chile, is the author of the novel La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas, 2016). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and teach creative writing at Clark University. Their current documentary poetry project on the Salem Witch Trials, Salem Songs, treats the court examination as poetic form, a hybrid of legal language and lyric utterance.

James R. Scrimgeour is Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University. He has published ten books of poetry and a critical biography of Sean O’Casey. His most recent book, Voices of Dogtown: Poems Arising Out of a Ghost Town Landscape (Loom Press, 2019), was listed as a “must read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press, forthcoming) and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read.’ Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review and elsewhere.

September 8, Bryant Park Poetry Series, CavanKerry Press Poets, Cindy Veach, Joseph O. Legaspi, January O’Neil,
and Margo Taft Stever, 7:00 p.m., Reading Room at Bryant Park, NYC, NY.

This reading will be rescheduled in 2021.

I will be attending AWP 2020 in San Antonio, TX - March 5-7

Book Signing for "Gloved Against Blood"
March 6, 2020
11am- 12pm
AWP Bookfair - CavanKerry Table # T2260

I'll be featuring at the Walnut Street Cafe's Speak Up!
Come join me and bring a poem for the open mic.

September 25, 2019
7:30 pm
Walnut Street Coffee Cafe
157 Walnut St
Lynn, MA 01905

Join me at the 5th annual New Hampshire Poetry Festival where I will be participating in two panels (details below).

Saturday, September 14, 2019
New England College
98 Bridge Street
Henniker, NH 03243

1:30-2:45
Challenging the Quintessential Motherhood Poem
CEI Building, Room 101
Panelists: Jennifer Martelli, Kyle Potvin, Marjorie Tesser, Cindy Veach

The earliest motherhood poems were paeans, odes often written by male poets about their mothers. Self-sacrifice, modesty, and other traditional “virtues” were lauded; mothers were discussed in highly sentimental terms, and motherhood itself deemed a time of unremitting happiness. Today’s poems about motherhood are more often written by mothers themselves. By revealing truths about motherhood, they subvert stereotypes and forge a new poetry of diverse experiences of mothering. The panel will read excellent poems, their own and others’, that discuss such subjects as physical aspects of motherhood, work of motherhood and how motherhood impacts on other work, boredom, frustration, and other negative emotions mothers were not supposed to have, and also poems that depict and celebrate the joys of mothering and mother love authentically. As is noted in Jennifer Militello’s article, “From the Maternal to the Mechanical” (APR May/June 2017), “America’s contemporary poets are now in a position where they must explore ways of writing about motherhood that can defy sentimentality and resist the cultural pressure to present motherhood mainly as a source of happiness.”

3:00-4:15
Is This the End of the Beginning? Or the Beginning of the End?
CEI Building, Room 102
Panelists: Jennifer Martelli, Dawn Paul, Marjorie Tesser, Cindy Veach

How do you get out of a poem? How do you write an ending that peels out of the driveway like a doomed lover? That drifts down like fog or gives a final firecracker pop? Is your poem linear—a narrative that tells a story with a beginning and an end? Is your poem circular—with no ending? There are many new, invented and traditional forms that lend themselves to specific line-count for endings (American Sonnet, ghazal, the “duplex”, sestina) but, how do you keep your poem from being too “tidy?” How do you guard against overwriting your ending? When is enough enough? When is enough too much? Panelists will address these questions, and more, by sharing their own techniques and craftsmanship, as well as their favorite poems with emphasis on endings. In addition, they will examine various kinds of endings and how they make the meaning and mood of the poem. This panel will end with a generous Q & A and attendees will receive a handout of prompts designed to focus on poem endings.