An Afternoon with Dawn Lundy Martin, Jennifer Martelli, Mary Lou Buschi, & Eileen Cleary (In person at HVWC)

Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of five books of poems: Instructions for The Lovers (Nightboat Books, 2024), Good Stock Strange Blood, winner of the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry; DISCIPLINE, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering, and three limited edition chapbooks. Her nonfiction can be found in n+1, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Martin was the first person to hold the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh where she co-founded and directed the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is currently working on memoir titled When a Person Goes Missing, forthcoming from Pantheon Books. She is Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.

Jennifer Martelli will read from her latest collection, Dear Justice (Grey Book ress, 2024). She is also the author of The Queen of Queens and My Tarantella, awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and named as a finalist for the Housatonic Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks All Things are Born to Change Their Shapes, winner of the Small Harbor Press open reading, In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mates, and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, Atticus Review, The Tahoma Literary Review, Scoundrel Time,Verse Daily, Iron Horse Review (winner of the Photo Finish contest), and elsewhere. Jennifer Martelli has twice received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for her poetry. She is co-poetry editor for Mom Egg Review. www.jennmartelli.com

Mary Lou Buschi’s collections of poetry are Blue Physics (Lily Poetry Review Books 2024), Paddock (Lily Poetry Review Books 2021), Awful Baby, (Red Paint Hill 2015), and 3 chapbooks: Ukiyo-e, Tight Wire, and The Spell of Coming (or Going). Mary Lou holds an MFA in poetry from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and a Master of Science in Urban Education from Mercy College. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals such as Ploughshares, FIELD, Willow Springs, Indiana Review, Radar, Thrush, Tar River, Cream City, Pank, Rhino, The Laurel Review, among others. Mary Lou has been nominated for Best New Poets 2014. She was a finalist for Best of The Net Anthology, 2014. Mary Lou has received fellowships from The Santa Fe Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and The New York City Teaching Fellows. Currently, she is a special education teacher in the Bronx. She lives in Nyack, New York with Max (dog) and Jeff (husband).

Eileen Cleary is the author of, most recently, Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate Books, 2024). Her other books are 2 a.m. with Keats (NixesMate Press, 2020) and Child Ward of the Commonwealth (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), which received an honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, West Texas Literary Review, The American Journal of Poetry, JAMA, Right Hand Pointing and other journals. Eileen is a 2016 and 2018 nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Eileen founded and edits the Lily Poetry Review and Lily Poetry Review Books, and hosts/curates the Lily Poetry Salon. She is a graduate of Lesley University’s and Solstice of Pine Manor’s MFA programs. As a nurse and poet living in Massachusetts, she is passionate about poetry and its witness of humanity.