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Two Connecticut Poets Featured at Upcoming Reading

The Clinton Art Gallery’s Poetry Place will celebrate spring with a reading by two Connecticut poets, Leslie McGrath and Lana Orphanides, on Sunday, June 23 at 2 p.m.

The reading is the third in the gallery’s 2019 Sunday Series and will take place in the Laurel Ann Olcott Art Center at 20 East Main Street, Clinton.

The Clinton Art Gallery’s Poetry Place Sunday Series is in its fourth year of featuring readings by Connecticut poets, readings that include an open mic on the third Sunday of each month, from April to November. Beginning in 2016, the Sunday Series has consistently drawn an enthusiastic audience of poetry admirers, who enjoy hearing fine poetry by featured readers, together with local poets reading at the open mic.

The gallery also has arts and crafts on display and for sale.

In addition to the Sunday Series, the gallery offers a variety of writing and art workshops throughout the year. The reading is free and open to the public, and audience members are encouraged to come early, as seating is limited. Wine, snacks, and sweets will be served, and copies of the poets’ books will be available for sale and signing following the reading.

McGrath’s third poetry collection, Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives, was published in June 2018 by The Word Works. Winner of the 2004 Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry, she is also the author of two other full length books of poetry, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (Main St Rag, 2009) and Out From the Pleiades (Jaded Ibis Press, 2014), as well as two chapbooks, Toward Anguish (Providence Athenaeum, 2007) and By the Windpipe (ELJ Press, 2014.)

Orphanides received her master’s degrees from Northeastern University and Wesleyan University, where she wrote a collection of poems for her thesis project under the guidance of Edwina Trentham. She taught at New London High school for 18 years and began an award-winning literary and arts magazine. She was also the co-founder of the poetry journal A Letter Among Friends. Orphanides has been the opening voice at the Mystic Arts Café and the featured poet at the Hygienic in New London, and has published a chapbook, Sea and the Sound of Wind, Poems of Greece, as well as a collaborative book of paintings and poems, Spring: Rebirth and Renewal, and most recently a poetry collection, Searching for Angels, published by Anthem Press. She worked with Anna Flores in Poetry of the Wild, through which poems were posted both in natural settings and public spaces. She is a member of the Connecticut River Poets and lives with her husband in a house by the sea where her two sons grew up.

More information is available from Pat Barone at pattonybarone@aol.com or 203-627-4148.