On June 18 at 7 p.m. Poets Barbara Benoit, Jacqueline Gens and Tim Mayo will read from their works.

Barbara Benoit is a 2009 graduate of New England College’s MFA in Poetry Program. She has an undergraduate degree in jazz piano. Her poems have appeared in Blueline and Babel Fruit and are forthcoming in the Spring Edition of Cimarron Review. She will be reading from her manuscript entitled Black with Miraculous Light.

Jacqueline Gens is the co-director and a founder of the MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. For many years, she worked at the Naropa Institute (now University) in Boulder, CO, before joining the staff of the late poet, Allen Ginsberg in NYC. An early member of the Monteverdi Artists Collaborative at Packer Corners Farm in Guilford, Vt, she has worked as program director for numerous regional nonprofits, including, the Great River Arts Institute and the Shang Shung Institute of Tibetan Studies located in Conway, MA. She is on the board of Write Action and hosts 2 monthly radio shows on WVEW Brattleboro Commmunity. Her chapbook, Primo Pensiero, with a foreward by Anne Waldman was published by Shivastan Press in the fall of 2008.

Tim Mayo holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars. His poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals and on Verse Daily as well as The Writer’s Almamac. His chapbook The Loneliness of Dogs (Pudding House Publications 2008) was a finalist in the WCDR 2008 Chapbook Challenge in Ontario, Canada, and his most recent publication The Kingdom of Possibilities (Mayapple Press) was a semi finalist for the 2009 Brittingham and Pollock Awards, a finalist for the 2007 Main Street Rag Award and lastly, a finalist for 2009 May Swenson Award. He is a former member of the Brattleboro Literary Festival author committee.

Copies of the poets' books will be available.