November 28, 2022

An afternoon of poetry and folk music December 3

The Poetry Center at PCCC invites you to the Hamilton Club for an afternoon of folk music and poetry on Saturday, December 3.

Poetry workshops begin at 10 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. and end at noon. Pre-registration is required. 

At noon, the Folk Arts Center of Northern NJ will present a free concert with Italian folk artists, Beth Ann Mastromarino on drums and Charlie Rutan on bagpipe and flute.

At 1:00 p.m., the Poetry Center will present free readings by featured poets, Airea D.
Matthews and José Antonio Rodriguez, as part of its Distinguished Poets Series. An open reading will follow.

The Hamilton Club is located at 32 Church Street in downtown Paterson. Parking is available at the PCCC parking lot on College Blvd., between Memorial Drive and Church Street. Refreshments served.





THE POETS
Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Simon and Schuster, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where
she directs the poetry program.

José Antonio Rodríguez, poet, memoirist, and translator, is the author of the poetry collections This American Autopsy, cited in The New York Times as “new & noteworthy;” Backlit Hour, a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; and The Shallow End of Sleep, winner of the Bob Bush Memorial Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; and the memoir House Built on Ashes, a finalist for the PEN America Los Angeles Literary Award, the International Latino Book Award, and the Lambda Literary Award. His work has appeared most recently in The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and the Academy of American Poets website. A Mexican immigrant and first-gen college graduate, he holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University and is an Associate Professor at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.




THE MUSICIANS
Beth Ann Mastromarino is a 4th generation Italian-American from Brooklyn, NY. She was raised in a multi-generational home where, from an early age, she was steeped in the rhythms, songs, and folklore of her ancestors who hail from Sicily, Naples, and the neighboring Montemarano. Over the past ten years, she has taught workshops on the topics of Italian folk traditions, and the steps and beats of the Tammurriata and Tarantella. An alumna of New York University, Beth currently serves on the Board of Directors of D’Italia Programs, the first Italian-American performance group, founded in the USA in
1932. She is also a member of Andiamo!, an Italian-American musical troupe bringing authentic Italian folk music to America. 

Charlie Rutan has parlayed the bagpipe into an international performing, teaching, and recording career, bringing his woodwind expertise on Italian, Scottish, Irish, and French bagpipes to audiences all across the USA, in Canada, and Europe. His duo “Zampognari di Filadelfia”, in 2011 produced the acclaimed CD “An Italian Bagpipe Christmas”. He has performed with “Coro d’ Italia” for a decade and was designated a Master Folk Artist by the state of New Jersey in 2021. Post-pandemic, Charlie joined DC-based Renaissance band “Tower Green”, as they put a 21st-century spin on 700-year-old music. His
latest project “ANDIAMO~!” featuring dance music of southern Italy, gave its first performance at the Avenue of the Arts in Philadelphia this past October. www.charlierutan.com




Maria Mazziotti Gillan's new poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets  a pairing of her poems with her paintings. Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.

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