The sixth annual Mayapple Writers’ Retreat, which takes place at Byrdcliffe from July 27 to 31, will present four public readings of poetry and prose by regional and national writers at a quartet of local venues including two restaurants, the Woodstock Library, and Byrdcliffe’s historic Villetta Inn.
Saturday, July 29: The Golden Notebook in Woodstock presents a reading by the dynamo of American arts and letters Joyce Carol Oates at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum.
Sunday, July 23: This week marks the 90th birthday of Hudson resident, Pulitzer Prize-winner, retired Bard College professor and former New York State poet laureate John Ashbery. Small presses being the lifeblood of even poets as famous as Ashbery, it’s a natural fit for this weekend’s Read & Feed to pay tribute to the occasion.
Author Greg Robinson will discuss the conflict between Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt over the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
In a time when civil discourse is becoming rarer, this year’s theme for the library’s summer reading challenge, Building a Better World, may be a welcome message.
Friday, June 30: Meet the author noted by the New York Times for being “a forensically skillful examiner of her characters’ motives, thoughts and behavior.”
By getting at such unexplainable truths about how art works itself from history, and finding the slow, methodical, yet personalized means to analyzing that which is basically intuitive, Jonathan Gould has demonstrated true literary soul.
Poetry, local and state-honored, rolls into the upstairs reading room at Golden Notebook Saturday, May 27 and Sunday, May 28, with readings by former New York State poet laureate Marie Howe with New York City-based Donna Masini on Saturday, and authors from the new “Tinker Street: Voices from the Green and Beyond” literary collection on Sunday.
Donaghue said he’s grateful to his community for their embracing what he said isn’t so much a commercial store, but a collective space.
A new Woodstock publishing entity, Wapner & Brent Books, has just come out with a new version of Dao De Jing, the Chinese master Laozi’s great work, on which the idea of Taoism is based.