Sat May 24 - 9:30pm-11:00pm
SpeakEasy Lounge

Readings by Lynn Swanson, Nick Gilbert and Jesse Stone.

Lynn is a prize-winning poet and fiction writer. She holds a BFA in dance from the University of Michigan and a master’s degree in creative writing from Michigan State University. She is published in poetry and fiction and is the author of a young person’s novel, Summer Dance, based on her dance experience. She taught creative writing at Michigan State where her students found success in becoming published and in winning prizes. Lynn most recently won a top award in the Robert Penn Warren Awards judged by John Ashbery.

Nick Gilbert was born in Elmira, New York on Oct. 5, 1944. He studied at Hamilton College, New Haven University, SUNY Binghamton, and Teachers College of Columbia University. Although his schooling was interrupted by a land war in Asia, the last two schools awarded him, respectively, a BA and MA. He's married with two grown daughters and last year retired after thirty-four years of teaching high school English at the Holton-Arms School. He'd like to thank his old Army buddy, Jess Stone, for getting him into this poetry reading predicament.

Jesse Arthur Stone’s poems have appeared in Margie: The American Journal of Poetry; Nimrod; Passager; Ilya’s Honey; The Peralta Press; Treasure House; Vermont Voices; North By Northeast; The Observer (London); CrossCountry (Montreal); Artemis; and Hayden’s Ferry Review. In 1988, he won a top award in the Arvon International Poetry Competition in England for his poem “Late Arrival.” The judges were Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney. Stone also has won awards from Artemis, Atlanta Review, the C.H. Jones Foundation, and the Dallas Poets Community.

In addition, he has contributed analyses of poems by Rita Dove for the CD Rom Exploring Poetry, an instructional program for high school and college students, and served as poetry editor for the Solstice Review, an annual anthology of poetry written by his students in an innovative arts-based healing program for frail elders. He also has been a visiting poet in high school and college creative writing classes.

Stone has an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with his wife, writer and dancer Lynn Swanson. He works as a senior science writer at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland.