Slapering Hol Press Presents the Annual War & Peace Reading (In-person)

The Slapering Hol Press at the Hudson Valley Writers Center will present the 21st annual Veterans Day Reading: Poets and Writers on War and Peace, Sunday, November 8th at 4:00PM, featuring Mark Pawlak.

BIOS:

Mark Pawlak is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Special Operation (Beltway Editions, 2026), Away Away (Arrowsmith Press, 2024), and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). His poems have been translated into Chinese, German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. His work has appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. He is retired from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he taught mathematics and received the Chancellors Achievement Award. He has been an editor of the Brooklyn-based literary press, Hanging Loose, for the past 46 years. He lives in Cambridge.

Sean Mclain Brown, winner of the 2026 SHP Chapbook Competition will also read selections of his book Shrapnel: A Dictionary of Damages. Sean Mclain Brown is a combat disabled Marine Corps veteran and member of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Veterans Writing Group. His writing is shaped by the lasting consequences of war. He is the recipient of the Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Prize, with poetry and fiction appearing in San Francisco Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Terrain.org , and Indiana Review, as well as in the anthologies Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace (Koa Books, ed. Maxine Hong Kingston), An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions), and Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War (Scarlet Tanager Press).

Additional participants are veterans and writers who are members of David Surface’s Veterans Writers Workshop. These writers include Bill Greenhut, Bernie Seiler, and Michael Lang.