Please join us on October 14th when our featured poets will be Doritt Carroll, Tara Campbell and Indran Amirthanayagam, upstairs at the Gaithersburg Library, 2-4 pm. The reading is hosted by Lucinda Marshall and will be followed by an Open Mic.
Doritt Carroll is (unfortunately) a lawyer and (fortunately) the mother of two daughters. A native of Washington, DC, she received her undergraduate and law degrees from Georgetown University. Her collection, In Caves, was published in 2010 by Brickhouse Books. Her book, GLTTL STP, was published in 2013 by Brickhouse Books, and the title poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner, was published by Kattywompus in 2017. Her poems have appeared in Coal City Review, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Nimrod, Slipstream, Rattle, Plainsongs, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Maryland Poetry Review, Explorations, Negative Capability, Poet’s Canvas, Illuminations, The Baltimore Review, Journal of Formal Poetry, Harlequin Creature, Lummox, Commonthought Magazine, Innisfree Poetry Journal, Folio, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and she has served as a Shakespeare Theatre poet-in-residence. She currently runs the Zed’s poetry reading and open mic series.
Tara Campbell is a fiction editor at Barrelhouse and an MFA candidate at American University. Prior publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, District Lit, Quail Bell Magazine, Jellyfish Review, Strange Horizons, and Heavy Feather Review. Her debut novel, TreeVolution, was published in 2016, and her collection of poetry and fiction, Circe’s Bicycle, was released in spring 2018.
Indran Amirthanayagam is a poet, journalist , musician, culture critic and diplomat. He writes in English, Spanish, French, Haitian Creole and Portuguese, and has published thirteen poetry collections thus far, including The Elephants of Reckoning (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 1993), which won the 1994 Paterson Prize in the United States, The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems (Hanging Loose Press, NY, 2008) and Uncivil War(Tsar/now Mawenzi House, Toronto, 2013). His French poems are included in Aller-Retour au Bord de La Mer (Legs Editions, Port au Prince, December 2014) and Il n’est que l’ile lointaine (Legs Editions, Port Au Prince, 2017). His latest in Spanish is Ventana Azul (El Tapiz del Unicornio, Mexico City, 2016). And in Creole he has published Pwezi a Kat Men(Delince Editions, Miami, 2017)– a dialog in poetry written with Alex Laguerre. Amirthanayagam’s articles, essays and op-eds have been published in the New York Times, the Hindu, Reforma, El Norte, The Indian Express, The Deccan Chronicle, The Daily News (Sri Lanka), the Island (Sri Lanka), among other newspapers. His theater criticism appeared in the Westsider and the Chelsea-Clinton News in New York City ( 1986- 1992). His first album, Rankont Dout, was released in January 2018.
Steven Leyva
work has appeared most recently in Little Patuxent Review, FORTH, vox poetica, Poetry Super Highway, Poets & Artists, Every Day Poems, Lunaris Review (Nigeria), Amsterdam Quarterly, and The Wild Word. Author of three collections, he’s been nominated for four national Pushcart prizes, is a member of the Shakespeare Folger Library’s poetry board, and organizes several events in Prince George’s County, MD and beyond including Poetry X Hunger and The Poetry Poster Project. He is a global hunger specialist, and lives in Upper Marlboro, MD.
Clarence Williams is a U.S. veteran who began writing poetry during his 20 years of service in the US Navy. He also possesses a broad range of expertise having spent many years as a program manager of logistics, engineering, and IT development projects, as well as an instructor and course developer, and he also won the Government Computer News 2006 Gala Award for Technology Innovations in Government Information Technology.
In 2001, Eve Burton started a Storytelling Club for young children at the Twinbrook Community Library. The next year she added a Poetry Club for young children, and she’s been engaged in Poetry Creation Activities ever since. She now leads a Poetry Club for young children as well as Adult and Teen Poetry Writing Groups at Quince Orchard Library and hosts a group of adult women who gather in her home to write poetry and eat dessert twice each month. Eve still tells stories, both on her own and with the Twinbrook Tellers of the Dogwood Dogs 4H Club, which she leads. Her poetry often reflects her fondness for a good tale. Recently Lucinda Marshall invited Eve to join the Diverse Poetry workshopping group and to read her poems at the June reading.
Laura Shovan is a former editor of Little Patuxent Review. Her chapbook, Mountain, Log, Salt and Stone, won the inaugural Harriss Poetry Prize. Laura edited Life in Me Like Grass on Fire: Love Poems and co-edited Voices Fly: An Anthology of Exercises and Poems from the Maryland State Arts Council Artists-in-Residence Program, for which she teaches. The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, her award-winning children’s novel-in-verse, is about students protesting the closing of their school.
Paulette Beete’s poems, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in journals including Crab Orchard Review,Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, among many others, and in the anthologies Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, DC and Saints of Hysteria (with Danna Ephland). She has also published two chapbooks of poetry: Blues for a Pretty Girl (Finishing Line Press) and Voice Lessons (Plan B Press). She has been a Winter Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and several of her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and blogs at 
Jay Hall Carpenter has been a professional artist for over 40 years, beginning as a sculptor for the Washington National Cathedral, and winning numerous national awards for his work. His first poetry collection, Dark and Light (2012), was followed by 101 Limericks Inappropriate For All Occasions (2107), and will be followed next year by a third, as yet untitled, collection. He has written poetry, plays, and children’s books throughout his career and now sculpts and writes in Silver Spring, MD.
DiVerse Gaithersburg 