Grateful Conversations Reading at Second Sunday, October 13, 2019

Second Sunday Poetry Series is an Open Mic poetry show, hosted by Alex M. Frankel, that happens on the second Sunday of every month. Great poets perform their work, sell and sign books, and mingle with audience members and open mic participants. 

Reading from Grateful Conversations: A Poetry Anthology edited by Maja Trochimczyk and Kathi Stafford will take place on October 13th, 2019 at 5pm at The Studio Theatre at St. Denis Building
3433 Cahuenga Blvd West Los Angeles 90068  (Near Universal Studios)

Participants will include Lois P. Jones, Kathi Stafford, Susan Rogers, and Ambika Talwar.

GRATEFUL CONVERSATIONS is a portrait of a group of female poets from California, who come together each month to hone their craft and share their verse.  Known as Westside Women Writers and active as a group since 2008, they include Millicent Borges Accardi, Madeleine S. Butcher, Georgia Jones Davis, Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Kathi Stafford, Sonya Sabanac, Ambika Talwar and Maja Trochimczyk.

In the words of the WWW founder, Millicent Borges Accardi, this is “a community of women writers working together to support each other with strong attention to craft, to grow as writers and as people in community.” The volume includes poems written for seven workshops and  poetic self-portraits of the nine writers.  Many photographs by the poets (Madeleine S. Butcher, Lois P. Jones, Susan Rogers, Sonya Sabanac, Ambika Talwar and Maja Trochimczyk) provide illustrations for the poems.

Paperback, 280 pages, with black and white illustrations

ISBN  978-1-945938-22-1  
Color Paperback, 280 pages with color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-945938-24-5 
E-Book in EPUB format with color illustrations
ISBN 978-1-945938-23-8 

http://www.moonrisepress.com/grateful-conversations-anthology.html

ABOUT THIS BOOK: 

"Nine women poets converse, wake us up, send us to higher ground. Grateful Conversations carries us in and out of the emotion of memory, family, spirit, solid things and landscapes. Unlike much modern poetry, the nine writers present life and hope, not death and loss. This anthology gives us abundance, not scarcity, joy, not the grating irritations of guilt, fear and dissolution. There are generous portions for each poet: Accardi, Butcher, Jones-Davis, Jones, Rogers, Sabanac, Stafford, Talwar, Trochimczyk each get twenty to thirty pages of poetry with photographs taken by the poets and also there are seven sections of workshop poems. These are poets on quests for spiritual renewal, yet the poems are not sticky with New Age platitudes, but articulate, moving, textured and the reader is grateful, uplifted. “Look at these dogwood blossoms/caught in the act of flying,” writes Lois P. Jones. We look and we fly.
                                                               ~ Alice Pero, author of Thawed Stars

MORE INFORMATION:

http://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/05/grateful-conversations-poetry-anthology.html (preface, table of contents)

https://moonrisepress.blogspot.com/2018/06/sample-poems-from-grateful.html (poets' bios and sample of poems)

Village Poets Feature Margaret Saine's Lit Angels on February 26, 2017

The first reading from Margaret Saine's newest book, Lit Angels, published by Moonrise Press in February 2016 will take place on the Oscar Sunday, February 26, 2017 at 4:3O p.m. Saine was invited to be the  Featured Poet at the Monthly Village Poets Reading for the month of February 2017. She will be accompanied on the classical guitar by Eva Zmijewska. 

The Village Poets Monthly Readings present poets and musicians of note, since 2010 over 60 poets have read their work. The reading on Sunday will take place at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga (10110 Commerce Ave. Tujunga, CA 91042) and will include two segments of open mike and refreshments.  You can read more about this reading and other poets featured at Bolton Hall Museum on the Village Poets Blog. 

MARGARET SAINE

Margaret Saine lives in Los Angeles. After a doctorate in French from Yale, she taught Spanish at universities in California and Arizona. She writes poetry, haiku, and short stories in five languages and also translates other poets. Her books are “Bodyscapes,” “Words of Art,” and 5 haiku chapbooks. Poetry mss. ready for publication are “The Five Senses,” “Reading Your Lips," "Words of Winter," and "While Alive," as well as “Paesaggi che respirano” [Breathing Landscapes], to be published in Italy. She has recently completed “As You Were Saying,” a dialogue with American poet William Carlos Williams.

Lit Angels (=Literature Angels ~ Angels of Light) is a collection of poetry inspired by literature and the arts. Written in English, the volume includes several translations into German, Arabic, French and Italian.


The Tree Outside


Above the window sill
the minuscule stippled leaves
dance in the breeze

Mulberry trunk
cut by the window sill 
as if as if—

By inner eye we know 
the tree to be intact

Trunk reaches down to roots
where the atoms come from
roots and trunk 
spread into sky
rhizomes breathing 
the vital breath 
that sustains us

(c) by Margaret Saine, from Lit Angels

Lit Angels by Margaret Saine 

96 pages (xiv + 82 pages), illustrated with 14 photographs by Saine

Moonrise Press, February 2017

Distributed by Lulu.com, soon on Amazon and other online sites.

Paperback, ISBN  978-1-945938-02-3, $15.00

Color Paperback, ISBN 978-1-945938-04-7  , $35.00

EBook, for  iTunes, Nook, etc., ISBN 978-1-945938-05-4, $10.00

ABOUT LIT ANGELS

This book is Margaret's elegant, wise, and worldly oeuvre - a distilled reflection of her sagesse and sophistication. Enjoy it!

~ Mani Suri


Like her photography, Ute’s poems breathe movement, shadow and light that immediately transports the reader to the experience of moving within the social fabric of her woven words.

~ Virginia Jasmin Pasalo, poet, editor of "The Tree Anthology," Manila, the Philippines 



The poetics of Margaret Saine is a pleasant flight, ranging back and forth between sigifiers and the signified, giudiciously exploring art and nature. Each element is endowed with meaning, connecting it with human presence and human feeling. Under the poet’s gaze, a movement in time occurs that returns it to us, it tells us of other voices who are leaving traces in personal and universal history. An interesting, marvelous exchange occurs between the forms of being and their most profound abode, like a window to the sun, opening and smiling at us.

~ Rita Stanzione, poet and science instructor, Salerno, Italy

Right after the reading all guests and poets are invited to the Back Door Bakery and Cafe for the Artist's Reception celebrating "Rose of Roses" photography exhibition by Maja Trochimczyk - during the Oscar Night at the Cafe...Read more about the exhibition

on the Poetry Laurels Blog. Two other events for the exhibition include: An Evening of Poetry and Roses (St. Valentine's Day), and Shandy & Eva among the Roses on February 25, 2017 at 7:30 p.m.

http://villagepoets.blogspot.com/2017/01/margaret-saine-features-with-eva.html