Past Poetry Readings

David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College, both at the introductory and upper levels.  He has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in American Literary Review, Minnesota Monthly, The South Dakota Review, The Worcester Review, Worcester Magazine, and Henry Street.  His literary criticism has appeared in Mid-American Review, Pynchon Notes, The Hemingway Review, ANQ, and the
Oklahoma City University Law Review.

An essay entitled "The Narrative Structure of Barry Hannah's 'Water Liars,'" which began with an assignment Thoreen developed for an Assumption Honors course in Introduction to Literature, is slated for publication next year in Mississippi Quarterly.  Another essay, entitled "The Fourth Amendment and Other Modern Inconveniences: Undeclared War, Organized Labor, and the Abrogation of Civil Rights in Vineland" is to be included in Pynchon's Embodiments: Tales Beyond the Rainbow's End, forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.

Thoreen is on sabbatical for the 2001-2002 school year, working to complete his first collection of poems.

Stephen Campiglio
A former editorial assistant in the Public Affairs office at Assumption, Stephen Campiglio now teaches English at Holy Name Central Catholic High School in Worcester.  He is also a former member of Noh Place, a Worcester-based artists cooperative that lasted through the late 1980s.  Campiglio received his Bachelor of Arts in English from Worcester State College, and recently completed his Master of Arts in Education at Assumption College. His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Northeast Corridor, Ekphrasis, Coe Review, The Literary Review, Urban Spaghetti, 96 Inc, and Asylum, with work forthcoming in Calapooya, Into the Teeth of the Wind, and The Peralta Press. He has completed two chapbooks of poetry: one, a collection of prose poems, and another based on the paintings of the Belgian surrealist, Rene Magritte.

David Cappella is an Assistant Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. He was formerly the Acting Director of the Teacher Education Program at Wabash College, as well as a former secondary school teacher. He received a doctorate from Boston University in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialty in English Education.

He has lived in New England his entire life, alternating between Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, and now Connecticut, and has taught English for a total of 31 years now.

Jonathan Blake

Jonathan Blake lives and writes in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. He is an Instructor in the Language and Literature Department at Worcester State College, and has published poems in a variety of journals. He has also been the first-place winner in both Worcester Magazine's and the Worcester County Poetry Association's annual poetry contest.

Diner is an international journal with Worcester roots. Each issue features two poets with a Worcester connection, and each cover will feature a different diner. We chose to name our journal Diner because most of the Diners scattered around the country were made by the Worcester Lunch Car Co. which closed its doors in 1961.

One to three poems of approximately forty other poets are included in each issue, along with poetry book reviews and "Mo' Joe," a list of the favorite books of a selected poet.

Diner premiered in Spring/Summer 2001 with the Miss Worcester Diner on the cover and Mary Fell and Fran Quinn as featured "Blue Plate Special" poets.   The current issue features the poets Joseph Langland and Bill Tremblay. Langland created the MFA Writing Program at UMass, Amherst-- the second such program in the country. He was also very supportive of the Worcester poetry in the beginning years of the Worcester Country Poetry Association. Tremblay was born and raised in Southbridge. He teaches at Colorado State University. The poems in Diner are from his 6th book of poetry, "Bread without Sorrow."

Tonight's readers will be reading their own poems appearing in the current issue of Diner.  The poets are: 

Diner editors Abby Millager and Eve Rivkah will read poems by the featured poets, Langland and Tremblay.

Photo by Lisa Van Liew

Adria Bernardi is the author of a collection of short stories, In the Gathering Woods, which was awarded the 2000 Drew Heinz Prize for Fiction and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Her novel, The Day Laid on the Altar, was awarded the 2000 Bakeless Fiction Prize by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College and was published by the University Press of New England.  It was published in 2001 in paper by Plume.  Her translation from Italian of Gianni Celati’s Adventures in Africa was published in 2000 by the University of Chicago Press, and her translation of Rafaello Baldini’s theatrical monologue Page Proof was published in 2001 by Bordighera Press.  She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
 
 
 
 

Terry Farish

Photo by Nancy G. Horton 

Terry Farish writes novels for children and adults.  Her most recent book is  A House in Earnest set in Bethlehem, New Hampshire and tells the story of a marriage in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Other novels include If the Tiger and Flower Shadows.  Her books for children include the novel Talking in Animal and a forthcoming picture book.  She teaches writing at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland, Maine, and presents literacy programs using folktales from around the world.
 
 
 
 

Jim Beschta was born and raised in southeastern Wisconsin.  After moving to Massachusetts to pursue a graduate degree in English at Assumption College (MA ’72), he settled in Barre, a small rural New England town where he and his wife Mary raised a daughter, Shayne, and a son, Luke.  He still teaches English and writing at Quabbin Regional High School in Barre and at the Worcester Art Museum.  He has been published in over twenty literary magazines and has read his work in various venues throughout New England and the upper Midwest.  He has won several poetry prizes including a Promethean Lamp Poetry Award. He is the coauthor of the anthology Bone Cages, and has had his work translated into Chinese at the University of Nanjing.  His most recent publication is Cutting the Cemetery Lawn (Haley’s). Reviewer Ralph Hughes has described this work as “a powerful book of poems, simple in diction and eloquent in the heart.”

He has won a Teacher of the Year award from the Excelsior Chapter of the National Honor Society, an English Teacher of the Year award from the Central and Western Massachusetts Council of Teachers of English, and a Ricker Award for being The Teachers' Teacher from the Massachusetts Council of Teachers of English.  He has coached wrestling and football and currently teaches a writers' workshop at the Worcester Art Museum.

Assumption Student Poets
From The Phoenix

Katie Byrne, Editor
Bill Antonitis, Poetry Editor
Eric Carlson, Short Story Editor

The Phoenix is the undergraduate literary magazine of Assumption College. The purpose of The Phoenix is to give students the chance to publish their poems and stories, as well as discuss their works with fellow students and professors.  Prof. David Thoreen serves as advisor, but since he is on sabbatical this year, Professors Michael Land and James Lang have been standing in. Currently, editorial staff are in the process of putting together the Spring issue.

Katie Byrne is a senior, with a major in English, minor in geography, and a concentration in secondary education.  She has been an active member of the Phoenix since freshman year, and is “thrilled” to serve as editor.

Bill Antonitis has been on the Phoenix staff since his freshman year.  He is now a second semester senior, with a double major in music and English.  He plans to attend graduate school in the fall.

Eric Carlson is also a senior here at Assumption, with a double major in English and politics.  He, too, has been involved with the Phoenix for four years.  Next year he plans to attend graduate school.

Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at Holy Cross College where he is professor of English and Barrett Professor of Creative Writing.  He has published four collections of poems:

Life-list, which won the Ohio State University Press/Journal award in l987, What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech Press, l991), Heavy Grace  (Alice James, l996), and Against Consolation (due in April from CavanKerry Press).

Cording has also co-edited In My Life: Encounters with The Beatles (Fromm International, 1998)

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, twice from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts, and from Bread Loaf.  In l992, he was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.  His poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, DoubleTake, Paris Review, Georgia Review and the New Yorker.  He lives in Woodstock, Connecticut with his wife and three children.

"Robert Cording’s third collection of poems, Heavy Grace, is a luminous addition to the literature of last things, which is always rooted in the here and now. ... This is a poet as familiar with the ways of birds as with what he calls the ‘deep syntax of grief’. Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the brave spirits hovering behind this book, Cording recognized that the ‘heart cannot be comforted,’ yet his stern poems offer a measure of solace, a kind of grace—a way to live in the here, the now."
—Christopher Merrill

“…there is the undeniable centrality of grace to his poems, by which of course I mean pure writerly grace among other things: Cording's measured verse moves with ease, showing none of the over-management and willfulness evident in much so-called New Formalism; equally unstrained are his free verse lines, or more accurately -- given his manner of composition -- his sentences, which everywhere satisfy Pound's demand that poetry be at least as well written as good prose.”
—Sydney Lea
 

Gray Jacobik

A widely-published poet, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing and an Artist's Fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, Gray Jacobik's work has appeared recently in The Best American Poetry 1997 & 1999, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, Sycamore Review, Ploughshares, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other publications. She is the 1997 winner of The Yeats Prize given by The Yeats Society of New York, The Emily Dickinson Prize sponsored by Universities West Press, and the Associated Writing Program's Poetry Series Award for 2001. Her book, The Double Task, University of Massachusetts Press (1998), received The Juniper Prize and was nominated for The James Laughlin Award. The Surface of Last Scattering (Texas Review  Press, 1999) was selected by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises, winner of the AWP Poetry Series Award, will be published in the fall of 2002 by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Gray has read her work in performance in a number of settings from pubs to universities and on the radio. She has read at The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in Farmington, Connecticut, at St. Joseph's University in Hartford, Salem State University in Massachusetts, Wesleyan University, The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and at many other arts organizations, colleges and universities. This summer she will be the Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place.

Gray Jacobik is a professor of literature at Eastern Connecticut State University in Willimantic, Connecticut, where she teaches courses in 19th and 20th century American and British poetry and creative writing. Currently she serves as Chair of the English Department. She earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in American and British Literature from Brandeis University and her B.A. from Goddard College.

Gray is a painter as well as a poet. She lives in Pomfret, Connecticut with her husband, Bruce Gregory, who is a science administrator at the  Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge. They share their  home with a Shetland Sheepdog, a Keeshound, and two tuxedo shorthairs. She has a son and a daughter who both make their homes in California.

“To read Gray Jacobik's work is to be pleasurably illuminated - to live in a wider and more finely  comprehended world."
 --X. J. Kennedy

"The language of these poems is rich, sonorous, and precise. The intelligence is keen and never flagging. Add to this a sensuality that is occasionally sexy and always appealing. The combination of these qualities makes Gray Jacobik a rare poet, one not to be missed."
-- James Tate

Page last updated: August 25, 2005