Winter 2017 Launch Reading

Celebrate LPR’s latest print issue by attending our Winter 2017 launch reading. On Sunday January 22, 2017, from 2 to 4 p.m. writers from the issue and members of the LPR staff will read their work and discuss current projects.

Readers will address the issue’s theme, Prison. Editor Ann Bracken will talk of her writing workshops in the Patuxent Institution for offenders sentenced when they were youth. Other readers of poetry and prose include Leona Sevick, Cynthia Greer, Shirley Brewer, Kendra Kopelke, Ann Quinn and Akewi “Anthony” Barnes. A reception will follow. All are welcome.

Sunday, Jan. 22, 2017, 2 to 4 p.m., Oliver’s Carriage House, 5410 Leaf Treader Way, Columbia, MD 21044. 

Bios of selected readers:

Anthony “Akewi” Barnes is an aspiring artist from West Baltimore who uses his creativity to liberate the souls of hopeless minds. He is a freshman at Baltimore City Community College but a senior in the struggle!

Ann Bracken is the author of two collections of poetry, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom (2017) and The Altar of Innocence (2015), both published by New Academia Publishing, Scarith Imprint, and she is the new deputy editor for Little Patuxent Review. Her poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in anthologies and journals, including Little Patuxent Review, Bared: Contemporary Poetry and Art on Bras and Breasts, New Verse News, Reckless Writing Anthology: Emerging Poets of the 21^st Century, and Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, among others. Ann’s poetry has garnered two nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She is the founder of the Possibility Project, which offers expressive arts and creativity workshops for people of all ages, as well as poetry and writing workshops in prisons and schools. Ann has two grown children and lives in Columbia, Maryland. www.annbrackenauthor.com

Shirley J. Brewer of Baltimore, Maryland, graduated from careers in palm reading, bartending, and speech therapy. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts and Technology in Baltimore County. Recent poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Poetry East, Slant, Gargoyle, Comstock Review, and other journals. Shirley’s poetry chapbooks include A Little Breast Music (2008, Passager Books) and After Words (2013, Apprentice House). Forthcoming in 2017 from Main Street Rag Press is her first fulllength poetry collection, Bistro in Another Realm.

Cynthia Greer was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. She currently resides in Washington, DC, where she is associate professor of counseling and education at Trinity Washington University. Her essay “Doris and the Dolls” was published in Little Patuxent Review in the summer of 2014 and selected as a “notable” essay in The Best American Essays of 2015, edited by Ariel Levy.

Kendra Kopelke is the author of four books of poetry, including Hopper’s Women, a collection of poems based on the paintings of Edward Hopper. She is co-editor of Passager Books and Passager, a press and journal devoted to older writers, and directs the MFA in Creative Writing & Publishing Arts program at the University of Baltimore.

Betty May is a theatrical director, writer, high school teacher, circus coach, and clown. Her career in theater has taken her across the United States; to Europe, where she toured England, France, and Switzerland with her Teens Onstage troupe; and to Central America, where she founded a company of ninety street children in a Guatemalan squatters’ settlement. She is an activist in the judicial system, testifying before congressional committees and advocating for people she once only knew through horrific newspaper headlines. Betty and her late husband, Gerald ( Jerry) G. May, MD, have five grown children: Earl, Paul, Greg, Julie, and a late addition: Chris. She lives in Columbia, Maryland, with a wussy dog and a neurotic bird. Her work with the women of I-WISH (Incarcerated Women Inside Seeking to/for Help) has been a fulfilling and life-changing journey, and she is grateful to them for sharing their lives.

Leona Sevick’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, North American Review, Potomac Review, Slipstream, Poet Lore, The Journal, The Florida Review, and the anthologies Circe’s Lament (Accents Publishing, 2016) and All We Can Hold (Sage Hill Press, 2016), among other publications. Her poems are forthcoming in American Arts Quarterly and The Golden Shovel Anthology (University of Arkansas Press, foreword by Terrance Hayes). She is the 2012 winner of the Split This Rock Poetry Contest, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye, and she was a semifinalist for this year’s Levine Prize. Her first chapbook, Damaged Little Creatures, was published in 2015 by FutureCycle Press. She is a provost at Bridgewater College in Virginia. www.leonasevick.com.

Ann Quinn lives in Catonsville, Maryland, with her husband and two children. She teaches clarinet and writing and plays clarinet and bass clarinet with several local orchestras. She won first prize in the 2015 Bethesda Literary Festival Poetry Contest, judged by Stanley Plumly, and is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poems have appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Beechwood Review, Haibun Today and Snapdragon Journal. She is working towards an M.F.A. in poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University.