Rozzie Regulars Read Poetry Night on Zoom

This special event will feature seven Rozzie Reads regulars Mike Ball, Brooks Beisch, Phyllis Bluhm, Queen Hodge, Maureen McElroy, Vivienne Shalom, and Sandee Storey. For link contact hguran@aol.com

Michael Ball scrambled from daily and weekly papers through business and technical pubs. Born in OK and raised in rural WV, he became more citified in Manhattan and Boston. As one of the Hyde Park Poets, he has moderate success placing poems in numerous online and print journals and anthologies.    

Brooks Beisch is a professor-of-the-practice at Boston University’s teaching classes in branding and advertising to graduate students. He has worked in the fields of design, branding and advertising since the early nineties. Brooks’s first escapade into poetry began at the age of ten, when he wrote a few poems that were published at the local Tiburon, CA newspaper, the Ark.  

June Beisch’s essays and literary criticism appeared widely, and her fiction appeared in the Literary Review and the Charles River Review. She was a recipient of the Middlesex Poetry Award, the Virginia Lockwood Award for Poetry, and a Fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Arts. Her book of poetry, Fatherless Woman, was published in 2004 by the Cape Cod Literary Press.   

Phyllis Bluhm, one of the founders of Rozzie Reads Poetry, is primarily a visual artist, but began casually writing poetry over 40 years ago.   She has been a featured reader at Open Mike Poetry in Boston and recently had six of her poems paired with six photographs in the Boston Camera Club’s two-month long exhibition in the Seaport District of Boston.   

Henrietta “Queen“ Hodge is a graduate of Northeastern University with a BS in Biotechnology, and resides in Jamaica Plain.  A native Bostonian, Queen has authored several award-winning poems such as “Rocksberry” and “Blackness.”  Several of her poems have been published in National Library of Poetry anthologies.  She continues to write and read her poetry in and around the greater Boston area.   

Maureen McElroy, raised in Boston, attended Boston University and holds an MFA from Emerson College.  Her chapbook Car Poems (Finishing Line Press) appeared in 2020. Her work is widely published in journals including Nixes Mate, Mothers Always Write, Trampset, Fickle Muses, Literary Hatchet, and Io. She taught English and Latin before entering a career in real estate and now owns Jamaica Hill Realty in Jamaica Plain.   

Vivienne Shalom has been a committee member of Rozzie Reads for over five years and enjoys making poetry more accessible to the community. Vivienne often reads her poems at the open mic and had her first two poems published in Tell-Tale Inklings in autumn, 2020. She is also a mosaic artist, painter and author of the children’s picture book, The Color of Things.   

Sandra Storey’s poetry collection Every State Has Its Own Light (Word Poetry, 2014) was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award. Her poetry has appeared in New Millennium Writings, THEMA and the New York Quarterly, among other journals. She is a columnist for the Jamaica Plain Gazette and Co-director of Chapter and Verse Literary Reading Series. 

To sign up for this Zoom reading, contact hguran@aol.com   please note: we will not have an open microphone this time