Poetry reading set at Sussex County College

Newton - Penny Harter, John Chorazy, and William J. Higginson will present their poetry as part of The Idiom Reading Series at Sussex County Community College. The poetry is sponsored by the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center in the college library on Friday, Feb. 16 from 7 to 9 p.m. Penny Harter is published widely in journals and anthologies, and her literary autobiography appears as an extended essay in Contemporary Authors. Her most recent books are Along River Road, Lizard Light: Poems from the Earth, and Buried in the Sky. A new collection, The Night Marsh, is forthcoming from Word Tech Editions early in 2008. She has won three poetry fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; a fellowship in teaching writing from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; and the first William O. Douglas Nature Writing Award for her work in the anthology American Nature Writing 2002. She works as a teaching poet for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Arts-in-Education program. John Chorazy will be reading from his new collection, Walking Through My Father’s Garden, winner of the 2006 Chapbook Competition at William Paterson University. These poems speak of a deep connection to all that is living and all that have gone before us. His awareness of how precarious life can be speaks to the passion through which we must embrace what life we have. Chorazy is a teaching artist for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts’ Artists-in-Education program and has facilitated workshops for students and teachers through the New Jersey Writers’ Project, Arts Horizons, VSA of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Music Society’s Literacy Through Jazz Program. Chorazy’s poems have appeared in Lips, The Paterson Literary Review, and he has a collection of short poems, Poems for Lunch. William J. Higginson edited Haiku Magazine from 1971 to 1976, and founded From Here Press in 1975, publishing books by Allen Ginsberg, Ruth Stone, and others. He is best known for his books on haiku, including “The Haiku Handbook”; “Wind in the Long Grass”; and the two-volume set, “The Haiku Seasons” and “Haiku World.” His latest books include “Butterfly Dreams: The Seasons through Haiku and Photographs,” for which he translated 130 classic and modern Japanese haiku, and “Surfing on Magma,” poems. Online, Bill edits “Haiku and Related Forms” on the Open Directory. He has served as president of the Haiku Society of America, and as a haiku contest judge for the HSA, Japan Air Lines, The New Zealand Poetry Society, and others, and on the Selection Committee for the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards. He works as a visiting poet and with the Poetry Out Loud program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. The poetry reading is free and the public is welcome to attend. There will be an open reading following the poets. For more information, please contact Priscilla Orr, co-coordinator for the Betty June Silconas Poetry Center, at 973-300-2194.