Admission: $3 members / $6 public
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John Roche is an Associate Professor of English at Rochester Institute of Technology, a past President of the Just Poets organization, a former member of the board of BOA Editions, and the chief organizer of the 2010 Black Mountain North Symposium in Rochester, NY. He earned his PhD from SUNY Buffalo, studying with Robert Creeley and John C. Clarke.
Three full-length poetry collections, The Joe Poems (2012), Topicalities (2008) and On Conesus (2005), are available from Foothills Publishing (Kanona, NY), and his 2011 poetic memoir, Road Ghosts, published by theenk Books (Palmyra, NY), is available from Small Press Distribution. He edited Mo’ Joe: The Anthology for Beatlick Press (Albuquerque) in 2014. John Roche’s poems have appeared in magazines like Malpais Review, House Organ, Cedilla, Yellow Medicine Review, Flurb, Rootdrinker, Big Bridge, Jack Magazine, Interim, Intent, Woodstock Journal, Burning World, Napalm Health Spa, Redactions, and in several anthologies, including Vigil for the Marcellus Shale (2013), Liberty’s Vigil: The Occupy Anthology (FootHills 2012) and Hip Poetry 2012(Wind Publications). He also edited the collection Uncensored Songs for Sam Abrams (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008),co-edited Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind (FootHills, 2009) with Patricia Roth Schwartz, and edited Martha Rittenhouse Treichler’s Black Mountain to Crooked Lake: Poems 1948-2010, with a Memoir of Black Mountain College (FootHills 2010).
Patricia Roth Schwartz, poet, memoirist, fiction writer, playwright, and editor, was born on October 12, 1946, in Charleston, West Virginia. She also has lived in Los Angeles, Connecticut, Massachusetts, including Boston, and New York State. Educated at Mount Holyoke College, Trinity College (CT), and Antioch/New England, she has worked as a psychotherapist in private practice and as an adjunct instructor of both English and psychology at the community college level. Pat is widely published in small press journals, including Nimrod, Clackamas Literary Review, South Carolina Review, Palo Alto Review, Iron Horse, and Blueline. Her full-length books of poetry are Hungers (Blue Spruce), Planting Bulbs in a Time of War, and Other Poems, Down the Middle with a Nickel: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood in Poems, The La Brea Tar Pit Blues: a Memoir of a Los Angeles Adolescence in Poems and Short Lyric Prose, (all from FootHills), The Crows of Copper John: a History of Auburn Prison in Poems (Olive Trees), and The Loneliness of Squash: and other writings: flash fiction, creative non-fiction, and prose poems.
Her latest collection, Charleston Girls: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood in Poems, is currently available from FootHills and will be featured in this reading.
From 2001 to 2015, she served as a volunteer inside Auburn Correctional Facility, Auburn, New York, conducting a weekly poetry workshop with inmates. In 2008 she was named their Volunteer of the Year. Pat has edited four published books of their work, including the anthology Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind, co-edited by John Roche. She is currently writing a memoir about her experiences as a prison volunteer.
Pat’s short plays have been given a number of staged readings in Auburn, Rochester, and Waterloo, New York.
In 2010 Pat was awarded two arts grants through the DEC (De-Centralization) Program of NYSCA.
In 2011, two of her works were selected to be part of, respectively, Poets’ Walk and Story Walk, in Rochester. Currently Pat lives with her partner, Sandy Zohari, and their dog, Rosie, on their thirty-five acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven, in the Finger Lakes Region.