Halfway There will pop-up at the Montclair Art Museum's Free First Thursday Night with a roster of wonderful emerging and established local writers of poetry and prose:
Melissa Adamo
Mark Ferguson
Ananda Lima
Joseph Palestina
Joseph Rathgeber
Kem Joy Ukwu
The reading will be part of an exciting evening of events, many of which will honor National Poetry Month! The full schedule of festivities starts at 5pm and goes until 9pm; we will gather in the Museum's Rotunda for our reading at 7pm. Readings will start at 7:30.
Parking fills up, so come early to enjoy food trucks, a cash bar, art, literature and more!
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Melissa Adamo, associate editor at English Kills Review, received her MFA in Creative Writing from Rutgers University-Newark in 2012. Essays, poems, and reviews of hers have previously appeared in journals, such as Mezzo Cammin, Per Contra, and The Rumpus, among others. She currently teaches composition and literature courses at Montclair State University, Ramapo College, as well as Rutgers University-Newark, because well… why have one job when you can have three? Follow her word-thoughts about writing, snacks, and Broad City on Twitter @adamopoeting.
Mark Andrew Ferguson, a Bergen County native, is a writer, graphic designer, and sometimes publishing professional now living in Lincoln Park. His first book, The Lost Boys Symphony was published by Little, Brown & Co. in 2015. It was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and has been praised by Wally Lamb, Matthew Quick, NPR, and several others. The paperback is now available from Back Bay Books.
Ananda Lima has an MA in Linguistics from UCLA and has taught language and linguistics at UCLA and Montclair State University. Her work has been published on The American Poetry Review and she is a Spring 2016 AWP Writer to Writer mentee. She is currently working on a novel in stories set in Brasilia, the city where she grew up as the daughter of migrants from northeastern Brazil. She lives in Maplewood, NJ with her husband and son.
Joseph Palestina graduated with a BFA in Acting from Montclair State University. He won ‘Best Actor’ both in 2013 and 2015 at The New York City 48 Hour Film Festival in the films Spinach Quesadilla and Burn a Friend, two shorts he wrote and directed. He is the co-founder of touring indie rock band Thing-One and the creator of Joe Pal & Eggs, a web-series that mockuments his daily interactions. He has had several short plays produced by At Hand Theatre Company, Luna Stage and Strangedog Theatre Company. He has recently started a social called Art and Prozac in Montclair--an event that brings artists together to showcase their work. In 2012, he received an MA in Mental Health Counseling from Montclair State and is now a guidance counselor in Paterson, NJ.
Joseph Rathgeber is an author, poet, high school English teacher, and adjunct professor from New Jersey. His short stories and poems have appeared in The Literary Review, J Journal: New Writing on Justice, Mizna, Salamander, and elsewhere. His story collection is The Abridged Autobiography of Yousef R. and Other Stories (ELJ Publications, 2014). His work of hybrid poetry is MJ (Another New Calligraphy, 2015). He is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of a 2014 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship (Poetry), and a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship (Prose).
Kem Joy Ukwu's fiction has appeared in BLACKBERRY: a magazine, Carve Magazine, TINGE, Blue Lake Review, PANK and Jabberwock Review. In April 2016, she will serve as an Institute Scholar in the Writing from the Margins Institute at Bloomfield College. She earned her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University and her master's degree from Teachers College, Columbia University. She lives in New Jersey with her husband. More of her work can be found at kemjoyukwu.com.