This January I got to chat with Thom Francis Job—one of the Albany area’s busiest champions of poets and writers—on his Sanctuary Radio program, which you can listen to RIGHT HERE! We talked about Albany, hometowns, personal growth, my books, and hitting the road to travel and accrue experiences worth writing about, and then Thom boiled it down to about 11 minutes of the best bits from our chat. He also included my reading of “Albany,” a poem I performed at The Linda in December of 2021. The poem also appears in my book, Both Ways Home. It was a pleasure to chat with Thom, who is always collaborating, networking, publishing, and hosting one thing or another to promote poetry in our area as part of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild. I hope you’ll drop in and give our talk a listen, and be sure to check out the other writers he’s interviewed. It’s an excellent series that encapsulates the wide spectrum of talent across the Capital Region of New York.
Live at the Linda, December 2021
I had the pleasure and honor to join a bunch of fantastic poets at The Linda in Albany, NY last December to celebrate the end of another year of local poetry, and the recorded the session for WAMC, the area’s NPR affiliate, which you can listen to here. Albany Poets and the Hudson Valley Writers Guild have a great relationship with The Linda and they’re slowly releasing each poet’s performance as we near the end of 2022. Mine was posted in September. I haven’t listened yet (like most folks, the sound of my own voice makes me cringe a bit) but it was a fantastic night and I’m really proud of the poems I read, including a few that will appear in an upcoming book of mine (called Both Ways Home) that should drop before the holidays. Enjoy!
New Interview With Albany Poets
Last month, Rebecca Schumejda took a few minutes to interview me about one of my latest books (Feral Kingdom), my online literary journal Hobo Camp Review, my bookshop review blog The Bookshop Hunter, and other projects I have coming up with poets Kevin Ridgeway and J Lester Allen. The interview is now posted over at Albany Poets, the best website for finding out what’s going on in the literary world in upstate New York. They do a lot of great things for the community and I hope you’ll check them out. Thanks for reading!
The RED Bookshelf: Free Books for Kids!
I recently had an amazing experience volunteering at a local organization in Albany, NY that provides free books to children all over town. The RED Bookshelf not only sets up special red bookshelves at events throughout the year, allowing kids to rifle through gently read or brand new books to take home and keep as many as they’d like, but they also have permanent shelves set up all over town, in libraries, doctor offices, and in areas where kids might have have easy access to books, be it for geographic, financial, or other reasons. The RED Bookshelf accepts new or used books of good quality, and those are cleaned, organized, labeled, and distributed by a dedicated team of people eager to get books into the hands of kids, because a child that reads is far more prepared for the challenges that lie ahead in adolescence and adulthood. A reader is a thinker and we all know how much we need that in today’s world! If you’re interested in helping these great people get books into the hands and homes of children in need, you can check out their website and look for them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I loved spending some time with them and they will gladly accept any quality books, financial donations, or your personal time to help spread the joy of reading. Check them out!