Poetry Reading: Saturday, June 28th

JANET HAMILL , SPARROW, THOMAS DEVANEY

Location: Point 5 (383.5 Madison Avenue) in Albany, New York
The reading will begin at 5:00 PM and is free, with a suggested donation for the readers.

Their Bios:

SPARROW
Sparrow lives in the heart of the Catskill Mountains, within the snug village of Phoenicia, New York, with his wife Violet Snow and daughter Sylvia. For Sylvia's 16th birthday, Sparrow gave her Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, on cassette. Soft Skull Press has published three of Sparrow's books. (Watch him on www.rumur.tv/sparrow.)




THOMAS DEVANEY
Thomas Devaney is the author of A Series of Small Boxes (Fish Drum, 2007) and The American Pragmatist Fell in Love (Banshee Press, 1999). Devaney is a Senior Writing Fellow in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his MFA in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College, CUNY where he was a student of Allen Ginsberg. In 2001 he joined the Kelly Writers House, Penn's literary hub, for four years as program coordinator and producer of the monthly radio program "Live at the Writers House." Devaney has worked with the Institute of Contemporary Art (Phila) on a number of site specific, multi-sensory projects, including "Tales from the 215" for the Philadelphia Freedom exhibit with Zoe Strauss, and the performance "The Empty House" at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site for The Big Nothing exhibit.

JANET HAMILL

Poet, painter, and performer Janet Hamill was born in Jersey City, NJ. For her first five years she gazed across the Hudson from Weehawken, NJ, before the family moved north to New Milford, in Bergen County. In the mid-sixties Janet attended Glassboro State College (now Rowan University), in Glassboro, NJ, where she met life-long friend, singer/songwriter, Patti Smith. After graduating with a BA in English from Glassboro, Janet joined Patti in New York. Using the city as a base, and bookstore jobs as a livelihood, Janet lived out her first love, travel, during her twenties and early thirties. Some of her journeys included cross-country trips in the USA and sojourns in Canada, Mexico, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Denmark, England, France, Spain, Italy, and Ireland.

Janet is the author of four books: Lost Ceilings, Nostalgia of the Infinite, The Temple, and Troublante. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in anthologies such as Living With the Animals, Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, The Low-Tech Manual, The Unmade Bed, and Deep Down: The New Sensual Writing by Women. Some of the magazines and journals that have published her work are Bomb, City Lights Review, Café Review, Long Shot, Colorado North Review, Kansas Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Flash, and the Hart Crane Newsletter.

A strong advocate of the spoken word, Janet has read widely at well known poetry venues such as The Peoples' Poetry Gathering, St. Marks Church and the Walt Whitman Cultural Center. Early in September of 1997, Janet was the featured poet at the first Liss Ard Festival, in Skibbereen, County Cork, Ireland. The festival is held annually to raise world-wide environmental awareness.

In the summer of 1997 Janet began to perform her poetry with the music of Moving Star, a backing group of musicians named after one of her poems. They are Bob Torsello (bass), Jay LoRubbio (guitar) and Sean Healy (drums). In their short time together, Janet and Moving Star have performed at the The People's Poetry Gathering, The Knitting Factory and CBGB's Gallery in New York City, as well as clubs in Orange and Ulster Counties. Recently, Janet and the band released their first full-length CD, Flying Nowhere, produced by Lenny Kaye, with two cameo appearances by Patti Smith on clarinet.

Janet makes her home in New York State.