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Poets Zelia Abbot, Victoria Murphy, Karen Torop Featured at Upcoming Reading in Clinton

Celebrating the beginning of autumn, the Clinton Art Gallery’s Poetry Place Sunday Series will feature a reading by three Connecticut poets on Sunday, Oct. 15, from 2 to 4 p.m. West Hartford poet Zelia Abbot, Deep River poet Victoria Murphy, and Middletown poet Karen Torop will share the podium, offering three rich and varied ways of exploring the world through poetry. The reading will take place in the Laurel Ann Olcott Art Center at 20 East Main Street, Clinton, and local poets are invited to read at the open mic, which has become a very exciting and well attended part of the Sunday series.

The reading is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be served.

Abbot has a B.S. in Elementary Education from the D. C. Teachers College and a masters in Divinity from Andover-Newton Theological School. She has been a third-grade teacher, Girl Scout Leader, unit leader of day and overnight camps, a fifteen year member of The Hartford Chorale, and a chaplain at Long Lane School and South Shore Hospital. She began writing poetry in 1992 when an English class she was planning to take in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Wesleyan University was full, and she took class by poet Edwina Trentham instead.

Murphy is a native New Yorker, now living in Connecticut. A retired English teacher, she has worked at the Brearley School and at Hunter College in New York, at the Santa Fe (New Mexico) Community College, and most recently “just for fun” at the Essex Connecticut Library teaching an adult poetry course. A collection of her poems, In Defense of Worms, was published in 2014.

Torop is a poet and a clinical social worker. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Atlanta Review, Connecticut Review, Connecticut River Review, The Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, Theodate, and the anthology Forgotten Women (Grayson Press, 2017). She has given many readings throughout the state.

For more information, contact Edwina Trentham at trentham@comcast.net.