An Afternoon with Jessica Cuello, Matt Donovan, and Jennifer Martelli (in person & on Zoom)

Join us in person at the Hudson Valley Writers Center or live on Zoom as we welcome Jessica Cuello, Matt Donovan, and Jennifer Martelli as they read from their most recent collections. This reading is the launch of our HVWC Summer Reading Series! Masks are encouraged but not required. Tickets are free but donations towards the poets’ honoraria are welcome and appreciated.

Jessica Cuello’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award, and a longlist mention for The Julie Suk Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. In addition, Cuello has published three chapbooks: My Father’s Bargain (2015), By Fire (2013), and Curie (2011). In 2014 she was awarded The Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in CNY.

Matt Donovan is the author most recently of The Dug-Up Gun Museum (forthcoming from BOA Editions in November 2022) and the collection of lyric essays, A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape: Meditations on Ruin and Redemption (Trinity University Press 2016). He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Rome Prize in Literature, a Creative Capital Grant, and an NEA Fellowship in Literature. In addition to his poetry and nonfiction, Donovan frequently collaborates with his wife, the artist Ligia Bouton. Collaborative work includes Inheritance, a chamber opera about America’s gun violence that’s based on the life of Sarah Winchester, and the forthcoming Missing Department, a visual art and poetry erasure project that responds to missing person ads published in early 20th century pulp western magazines. Donovan lives in Massachusetts and serves as the Director of The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

Jennifer Martelli (she, her, hers) is the author of The Queen of Queens(Bordighera Press) and My Tarantella (Bordighera Press), awarded an Honorable Mention from the Italian-American Studies Association, selected as a 2019 “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 In the Year of Ferraro from Nixes Mate Press and After Bird, winner of the Grey Book Press open reading, 2016. Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The Tahoma Literary Review, The Sycamore Review, Cream City Review, 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.