Thursday, September 1, 2016 at 6 p.m. in the GoggleWorks with featured poets Eliot White and Jeff Rath

Welcome September with two poets and an open mic to follow the reading.


Eliot White is currently completing a Master’s Degree in American Literature at Millersville University. Before going to graduate school, he taught high school English, Social Studies, and Theater. He has presented at national and international conferences on the works of Cormac McCarthy, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Emily St. John Mandel, and Zadie Smith. Some other research interests include literature of the Iraq and Afghan wars, trauma theory, and cognitive and evolutionary theories of narrative. He has worked on the staff of Third Point Press, and is the host of The Turning Wheel, a monthly reading series showcasing local and regional poets and authors at DogStar Books. His writing has appeared in Sundog Lit, George Street Carnival, and Rapportage. To pay the bills, he works as a writer and content strategist for The Infantree, a branding agency in his home city of Lancaster, PA. Follow him on twitter: @eliot_white.

Jeff Rath is the author of four collections of poetry: The Waiting Room at the End of the World (2007), In the Shooting Gallery of the Heart (2009), Film Noir (2011), and his latest, The Old Utopia Hotel, all published by Iris G. Press. His work has been published in a number of journals including Everyday Genius, The The Journal, the Delmarva Review, and Fledgling Rag. He is the 2007 R.E. Foundation Award winner and a Pushcart Prize nominee.
 

Berks Bards is supported in part by a grant from the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts as administered locally through the Berks Arts Council and by the Friends of Berks County Public Libraries.

August 4, 2016 at 6 p.m. First Thursday with Jennifer Hetick

Join us in welcoming JENNIFER HETRICK as our featured poet
for First Thursday Poetry at the GoggleWorks on August 4th at 6 pm.

She will be reading selections from volume two of her new project "the labors of our fingertips:
poems from manufacturing history in Berks County." 

First Floor Cafe, 201 Washington Street, Reading

Open Mic

Liz Stanley Berks Bards

Biography

Jennifer Hetrick considers herself a language thrower of sorts. Having graduated from Clarion University with a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy and a minor in English writing, she contributes to Berks County Living Magazine, The Reading Eagle, and the Copper Development Association’s Copper in the Arts and other publications. And she occasionally does farm blogging for Weaver’s Orchard and Wolff's Apple House.

 

In the past, she wrote for Bucks Life Magazine, The Merchandiser, Lancaster Farming, Berks-Mont Newspapers, the Limerick-Royersford-Spring City and Perkiomen Valley Patch sites, growindie.com, phillyecocity.com, the Boyertown Bulletin, and MidAtlantic Farm Credit's Leader.

She has also interviewed poets from Israel and Turkey as well as from different parts of the U.S.

Hetrick is currently managing a three-year poetry project called the labors of our fingertips: poems from manufacturing history in berks county. The project involves interviewing older seniors who worked in Berks County’s factories and mills, creating poems from their memories, and publishing three volumes of books with the content. Each of the books will include 25 poems. The first book was released through Foothills Publishing in Kanona, New York in August 2015. The project is funded in part by grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Berks Arts Council.

 

 

In 2010, she started her own positive-only local news publication known as News, Not Blues, based out of Boyertown, Berks County. Throughout each year, she donates contemporary poetry books to the Boyertown Community Library through News, Not Blues, including books by Berks County poets. Invited to the first annual writers' festival at the Chautauqua Institution through a scholarship she received in 2004, she workshopped with Syracuse University's respected poet Bruce Smith. In 2011, she had a creative nonfiction essay about her mother published in the book Western Pennsylvania Reflections: Stories from the Alleghenies to Lake Erie through a call for submissions from at the University of Pennsylvania. She and good friend fellow poet Frank Wolfe of Royersford, Montgomery County used to attend and read at Otherwise Poetry, a monthly poetry reading at the Towne Book Center & Cafe in Collegeville, sponsored by The Mad Poets Society based in Media, Delaware County. She has studied under Berks County’s third poet laureate, Heather Thomas, and followed its fourth poet laureate, Craig Czury, on his Marcellus Shale poetry project in Northeastern Pennsylvania in 2012. She plans to teach poetry classes as well as river poems workshops and poetry workshops for seniors at retirement homes around the region in the future. Her blog, The Garden Harlot, easily explains her penchant for hiking and photographing scenes of plants from unexpected viewpoints. A lot of her freelance writing involves putting positives in front of people in a way which the world needs more than it will ever need or benefit from what's negative.