Reminder–March 8th is the first day of Daylight Savings, reset those clocks unless you want to miss the first hour of DiVerse!
Please join us on March 8th, 2-4 pm, when our featured poets will be Susan Sonde, Sistah Joy Alford, and Melanie Figg. The reading will be at the Quince Orchard Library (15831 Quince Orchard Rd./Gaithersburg 20878) and is hosted by Lucinda Marshall and will be followed by an Open Mic. Please feel free to bring a poem that you have written to share (one page maximum).
Susan Sonde s an award winning poet and short story writer. Her debut collection: In the Longboats with Others won the Capricorn Book Award and was published by New Rivers Press. The Arsonist, her fifth collection was released in 2019 from Main Street Rag and her sixth collection, Evenings at the Table of an Intoxicant was a finalist in the New Rivers New Voices 2019 contest. The Last Insomniac, a chapbook, now working its way to a full collection, was a 2019 finalist in The James Tate Award. Grants and awards include, a National Endowment Award in poetry. grants in fiction and poetry from The Maryland State Arts Council, and the Gordon Barber Memorial Award from The Poetry Society of America. Her collection The Chalk Line was a finalist in The National Poetry Series. Individual poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The North American Review, The Southern Humanities Review, The Mississippi Review, American Letters and Commentary, Bomb, New Letters, Southern Poetry Review, and many others.
Sistah Joy Matthews Alford is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Prince George’s County, Maryland as well as the Poet Laureate of Ebenezer A.M.E. Church in Fort Washington. She is an author, arts advocate, as well as the producer and host of award-winning poetry-based cable television show, Sojourn with Words. She is an alum of the late Washington, DC Poet Laureate’s “Poets in Progress” series and the Mariposa Writers Retreat and the founder of the socially-conscious poetry ensemble, Collective Voices. Sistah Joy is the author of three books, Lord I’m Dancin’ As Fast As I Can (2000); From Pain to Empowerment, The Fabric of My Being (2009); and This Garden Called Life (2011).She is a Charter Board Member of C.A.A.P.A. (Coalition for African Americans in the Performing Arts, Inc.) and a Lifetime Member of the Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center.
Melanie Figg is the author of the award-winning debut poetry collection, Trace, as well as a chapbook. She has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County, and other. Her poems, essays, and reviews have been published in dozens of literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, Conduit, and Iron Horse Literary Review. Melanie curates Literary Art Tours in DC galleries (a Washington Post Editor’s Pick) and teaches writing at the Writer’s Center and privately. As a certified professional coach, she offers women’s writing retreats and works one-on-one with writers and others.
Tanya Olson lives in Silver Spring, Maryland and is a Lecturer in English at University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). Her first book, Boyishly, was published by YesYes Books in 2013 and was awarded a 2014 American Book Award. Her second book, Stay, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in March 2019. She has also won the Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a Lambda Emerging Writers Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation. Her poem 54 Prince was included in Best American Poetry 2015.
Kristin Kowalski Ferragut is a regular contributor to open mics, at such venues as DiVerse Gaithersburg Poetry and Words Out Loud. She participates in local poetry and prose writing workshops, in addition to reading, biking, hiking and teaching. Her work has appeared in Beltway Quarterly.
DiVerse Gaithersburg 