[Yale-readings] Chester Voices, 5-16, 4 pm

[Nancy Kuhl]

         Chester Public Library Presents

Chester Voices:  A Celebration of Writers
Readings by Jonathan Gillman, Pamela Nomura, and Ravi Shankar

         Chester Meeting House
         4 Liberty Street
         Chester CT 06412
         860-526-0015

         Sunday, 16 May 2004, 4 p.m.

         About the Writers

           Jonathan Gillman
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.



                  Pamela Nomura
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.





                 Ravi Shankar
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 (http://www.drunkenboat.com <http://www.drunkenboat.com/> ), 
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, 
Instrumentality, 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 (http://www.artspacenh.org/).






Nancy Kuhl
Assistant Curator, The Yale Collection of American Literature
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University
121 Wall Street
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
Phone: 203.432.2966
Fax: 203.432.4047
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