The Gloucester Writers Center is a place for working writers in a working town
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Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach
February 6, 2019 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Jennifer Martelli is the author of My Tarantella (Bordighera Press). Most recently, her work has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry, The Bitter Oleander, Sugar House Review, The Baltimore Review, and The Superstition Review. She has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes and is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for Poetry. She is a poetry editor for The Mom Egg Review.
Jennifer will be reading from her new collection, My Tarantella, as well as some of her newer work.
Although My Tarantella centers around the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese and violence against women, it also speaks to the author’s upbringing as a girl in an Italian-American home in Revere, Massachusetts. From that vantage point, the poems explore trauma caused by the 2016 Presidential election. Kitty Genovese is woven throughout the book as a reminder that she is a living presence to the speaker.
Cindy Veach is the author of Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), named a finalist for the 2018 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, Salamander and elsewhere. She is co-editor of The Mom Egg Review.
Cindy will be reading from her debut poetry collection, Gloved Against Blood. She will also read a selection of new poems.
Gloved Against Blood explores the relationships of four generations of women against a backdrop of the patriarchal textile mills of 19th century Lowell, Massachusetts that were fueled by the blood and sweat of exploited mill girls and enslaved African-Americans in the south. This collection speaks to family, lost love, infidelities, abandonment and the close work, women’s work of mending what is torn and making it like new despite the forces of inherited histories.