Musical Moments event - Patricia Roth Schwartz Poetry Reading

Area poet and author Patricia Roth Schwartz reads from her work on September 10 and launches the library’s 2010-2011 Musical Moments program. Musical Moments is on the second Friday of the month, September through May, and features area musicians and poets. The program begins at 7:15 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Ms. Swartz’s is widely published in small press journals and anthologies. Her work has appeared in journals such as Olive Trees, The Lyric, Sojourner, Plainswoman, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Clackamas Literary Review, Litchfield Review, and the South Carolina Review. Her poetry has been included in a number of anthologies, including Rochester Poets for Peace 2000, Common Intuitions: Poems on Women; and The Dire Elegies: 59 Poets Write on Endangered Species. Her full-length collections include Planting Bulbs in a Time of War, and Other Poems (2005), Down the Middle with a Nickel: a Memoir of a West Virginia Childhood (2007), and The La Brea Tar Pit Blues: a Memoir of a Los Angeles Adolescence in Poems and Short Lyric Prose, which will be published in September. Her volume of short fiction, The Names of the Moons of Mars, was published in 1989 and won a Lambda Literary Award. She was selected as a Finalist for the Willamette Poetry Award from Clackamas for the 2004 Fall/Winter Issue and as a Finalist in both the Sow's Ear 2004 Poetry Contest and Rochester's ImageOut poetry contests for 2002 and 2003. She received 2nd place in Heart Lodge's 2006 contest. Ms. Schwartz appears frequently in readings at coffeehouses, bookstores, festivals, and other venues. In March 2008, she was one of five NY state women poets selected to read from their own work in conjunction with pieces by women composers presented during the "Women in Music Festival" at The Eastman School of Music in Rochester. She has conducted workshops for Writers & Books in Rochester as well as workshops for writers' groups in the area that have been funded by Poets & Writers. In 2001, she founded a Poetry Workshop in Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security men's prison in Auburn, where she continues to volunteer as the workshop’s sole facilitator. She served as co-editor of Doing Time to Cleanse My Mind, a book of the inmates' poetry. In June of 2008 she was designated "Volunteer of the Year" at Auburn Correctional. Ms. Schwartz earned a Bachelor of Arts in English composition from Mount Holyoke College, a Masters of Arts in English literature from Trinity College (CT), and a Master of Arts in counseling psychology from Antioch/ New England Graduate School. Ms. Schwartz was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and has lived in Southern California and New England. She presently lives in Waterloo. Musical Moments is sponsored in part by a grant from the Margaret Wyckoff Family Trust and is coordinated by Tom McClure of Geneva.

free