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Chester Public Library Presents <br>
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<b>Chester Voices: A Celebration of Writers<br>
Readings by Jonathan Gillman, Pamela Nomura, and Ravi Shankar<br>
<br>
</b> Chester Meeting
House<br>
4 Liberty Street<br>
Chester CT 06412<br>
860-526-0015<br>
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<b> Sunday, 16 May 2004, 4
p.m.<br>
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<x-tab> </x-tab>About the
Writers<br>
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Jonathan Gillman</b>
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<dd>Jonathan heads the Theater Department at the Greater Hartford Academy
of the Arts, and he is director of Looking In Theatre, the oldest
interactive teen social issue theater in the country. In 1993 he
published his first book of interconnected short stories, Grasslands
(Rutgers University Press), followed in 2001 with his second book,
The Magic Ring (Creative Arts Books). Jonathan has had more than 20
short stories published in literary journals across the country.
Born in New York City, Jonathan moved to Chester in 1998. He holds
a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a Master of Arts in French from
Harvard University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Theater with a
concentration in playwriting from the University of Minnesota.<br>
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Pamela Nomura</b>
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<dd>Pamela has held a variety of positions from hula dance instructor to
Chester’s assistant town clerk, and at one time she was a rock and
mountain climber scaling high peaks. Her writing career was
launched in 1988 after receiving the Hartford Courant’s Northeast
Magazine award for Best Student Writing. Since then she has
dedicated herself to nurturing the work of young writers. Pamela is
director of Trinity College’s Poetry Center and Poetry in the Schools
Program. She is a teaching artist with the Bushnell Partners
program and mentor for the Sunken Garden Young Poets Program. She chairs
the Creative Writing Department at the Greater Hartford Academy of the
Arts a magnet arts high schooland her workshops and readings have taken
place in prisons, shelters, convalescent homes, museums, libraries, and
schools throughout the
northeast. Her poems and
essays have been published in magazines and journals and in 2001, The
Hill-Stead Museum published her chapbook, Water and Land by Turns. She
has read twice at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, and has recently
been the featured reader for the Wallace Stevens Rose Garden Reading and
the Mystic Arts Café. A native of Hawaii, Pamela came to Chester in
1986. <br>
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Ravi Shankar</b>
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<dd>Ravi is Poet in Residence and Professor of English at Central
Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the online
journal of the arts, Drunken Boat
(<a href="http://www.drunkenboat.com <http://www.drunkenboat.com/%3E" eudora="autourl">http://www.drunkenboat.com
<http://www.drunkenboat.com/> </a>), which was launched in
2000. A recent article in Chronicle of Philanthropy (November 2003)
wrote this about Drunken Boat: “the journal is committed to a global mix,
bringing together, for example, in recent issues, graffiti artists, the
poet laureate of Eritrea, and writers like Yael Kanerek, Mark Rudman, and
Alice Fulton. One issue included the provocatively titled An
Apology for Poetry, or Why Bother With Billy Collins?, an essay which
generated heated dialogue. For just this sort of dedication to
eradicating boundaries between entrenched schools of poetics and their
sworn enemies, Drunken Boat has garnered serious attention.” His
first book of poetry<i>, Instrumentality</i>, is newly published from
Word Press. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such
places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York,
Descant, Catamaran, The Iowa Review and the AWP Writer's Chronicle, among
others. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club and
the Cornelia Street Café, and he has held residencies at the MacDowell
Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Ravi reviews
poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an
anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern
poetry. A graduate of the University of Virginia’s Creative
Writing Program as well as Columbia University, Ravi, who is a native of
Manassas, Virginia and South India, came to Chester in 2003. Please
join Ravi for his Connecticut book launch on Friday, 11 June, 7:00 p.m.
at Artspace in New Haven
(<a href="http://www.artspacenh.org/" eudora="autourl">http://www.artspacenh.org/</a>).<br>
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Nancy Kuhl<br>
Assistant Curator, The Yale Collection of American Literature<br>
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library<br>
Yale University<br>
121 Wall Street<br>
P.O. Box 208240<br>
New Haven, CT 06520-8240<br>
Phone: 203.432.2966 <br>
Fax: 203.432.4047</html>