Poetry READINGS and EVENTS

The Poetry Center at PCCC offers readings as part of the Distinguished Poets Series. It also hosts readings with poets who have been finalists and winners of contests and awards sponsored by the Center, including The Paterson Poetry Prize and The Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. There is an annual reading to celebrate the latest issue of the Paterson Literary Review and for occasional anthologies sponsored by the Center. Many of the readings and workshops offered at The Poetry Center are also featured on Maria Mazziotti Gillan's blog.

The Poetry Center will be holding both virtual readings and in-person events. The Zoom links for virtual events will take you to the live event and later to the archived recording.

Virtual readings begin at 2:30 PM ET unless otherwise noted below.

In-person readings begin at 1 PM in the Hamilton Club unless otherwise noted below. (directions to Hamilton Club)

Recent readings from the Poetry Center and archived videos from years past are now available on the Poetry Center at PCCC’s YouTube Channel.

Poetry workshops are conducted by most of the featured poets before their readings. For more information on how to register, see the Workshops page.

Readings for 2025 -2026

November 15, 2025 Publication Celebration
for the Paterson Literary Review #53

Join a group of poets published in the latest annual issue of PLR for a reading at 1 pm.

December 6, 2025 Martín Espada and Dante Di Stefano

Martín Espada’s new book of poems from Knopf is called Jailbreak of Sparrows. His previous book of poems, Floaters, won the National Book Award. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of five poetry collections and a chapbook, including, most recently, the book-length poem, The Widowing Radiance (Bordighera Press, 2025). His writing has appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2018, Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. He has won the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Manchester Poetry Prize (UK), the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, and many more awards. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018). He teaches high school English in Endicott, NY, and lives in Endwell, New York, with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny.

January 10, 2026 Jan Beatty virtual via Zoom

Jan Beatty’s eighth book, Dragstripping, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (Paterson Poetry Prize). Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. her website is janbeatty.com

February 7, 2026 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards for 2025 Reading

An afternoon of contributor readings from the Winners and some of the Honorable Mention poets.
NO WORKSHOPS ON THIS DATE
See the complete list of the 2025 Award Winners, Honorable Mention, and Editor’s Choice poems and poets (pdf)

February 21, 2026 Nicole Santalucia virtual via Zoom

Nicole Santalucia is the author of The Book of Dirt (NYQ Books), Spoiled Meat (Headmistress Press), and Because I Did Not Die (Bordighera Press). Her work has appeared in publications such as Colorado Review, Palette Poetry, The Best American Poetry, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Sonora Review, Fourteen Hills, The Cincinnati Review, The Rumpus, The Normal School, Out Magazine and elsewhere. She is a Professor of English, the Director of First-Year Writing, co-chair of the LGBTQ+ Advisory Council, and serves on the steering committee of the Institute for Social Inclusion at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

March 7, 2026 Barbara Crooker and Adele Kenny

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press), longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Her website is barbaracrooker.com

Adele Kenny is the author of 26 books (poetry and nonfiction). Her poems, reviews, and articles have been published in journals throughout the US and abroad, and her poems have appeared in books and anthologies published by Crown, Tuttle, Shambhala, and McGraw-Hill. She is the recipient of various awards, including two poetry fellowships from the NJ State Arts Council, a first-place Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, a Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and Kean University’s Distinguished Alumni Award. Her book, A Lightness… was a Paterson Poetry Prize finalist. A former creative writing professor (College of New Rochelle), she is the founding director of the Carriage House Poetry Series, poetry editor of Tiferet Journal, and has twice been a featured reader at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

March 21, 2026 Edvige Giunta virtual via Zoom

Edvige Giunta is the author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors and coeditor of six anthologies, including The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture and Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Political Essays on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, recipient of the 2023 Susan Koppelman Awrad for Best Anthology in Feminist Studies in American and Popular Culture, just published in Italy by Iacobelli as Le ragazze della Triangle. Her memoirs, essays, poems, and interviews appear in anthologies, journals, and magazines. At New Jersey City University, where she is Professor of English, she teaches courses on the memoir and a course on the Triangle fires as well as other literature and writing classes.

April 11, 2026 Paterson Poetry Prize Winner Reading
Joan Kwon Glass and Nancy Miller Gomez

Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic, mixed-race, Korean American poet, author of the poetry collection DAUGHTER OF THREE GONE KINGDOMS (Perugia Press, 2024), which won the 2025 Paterson Poetry Prize & the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2025 Balcones Poetry Prize. Her book, NIGHT SWIM, won the 2021 Diode Book Prize. Joan’s poems have been featured on NPR & in Poetry, The Slowdown, Poetry Daily, Passages North, Poetry Northwest, Korea Quarterly, Best American Poetry, Prairie Schooner & elsewhere. She has been a featured reader at the Westchester Poetry Festival, the Boston Book Festival & MASS Poetry & is a 2025 SWWIM writer in residence. Joan has served or is scheduled to serve as a visiting writer at Amherst College, Smith College, Wesleyan University, The New School, West Chester University, UCONN & elsewhere. She teaches workshops at Brooklyn Poets, Poets House & Hudson Valley Writers Center & lives in Milford, CT.

Nancy Miller Gomez (she/her) is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books), winner of the 2025 Paterson Poetry Prize, and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). An Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Adroit Journal, LitHub, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and was awarded a fellowship from the Jentel Foundation. Gomez co-founded an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, the Juvenile Hall, and as part of Cornell University’s Prison Education Program. She earned a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego, a MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and has worked as an attorney and a TV producer. Originally from Kansas, she now lives with her family in Northern California. As the Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz, she is working with the County Office of Education to provide poetry workshops to youth throughout the county.

April 25, 2026 Book Launch and Reading
for the Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award

Join us as The Poetry Center celebrates the publication launch of the winning book for the 2025 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Award with a reading by the winning poet and some finalists. The 2025 winner is Terry Rae Hall for her collection Neither Are Crows. The final judge was Joe Weil. Her collection will be published this month by NYQ Books. This award includes a $5,000 prize, 25 author copies, and this featured reading. Terry Hall Bodine is the author of the chapbook The Something We Make from Nothing (Seven Kitchens Press, 2024). Other recent publications include Cider Press Review, San Pedro River Review, Pine Row Press, and Litmosphere.

The five finalists and their manuscript titles are: The Hard Problem, Sarah Anne Stinnett; Rowhome in Flickering Light, Daniel Donaghy;  Bird Mnemonic, Kelleen Zubick; Telling, Mary Paulson; and Cosmic Idiot, Michael Montlack.

See laurabosspoetryfoundation.org for information on all the finalists, the Foundation’s work, and the manuscript award.
NO WORKSHOPS ON THIS DAY

May 2, 2026 Richard Blanco and José Antonio Rodríguez

Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs For All Of Us: One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.

José Antonio Rodríguez is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which are This American Autopsy, cited as “new and noteworthy” by The New York Times, and The Day’s Hard Edge. He’s also the author of the memoir House Built on Ashes, shortlisted for the PEN America Los Angeles Award and the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have been published widely, including in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The Missouri Review, and Paterson Literary Review. His work has been anthologized most recently in Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker: 1925-2025, How to Get Home in the Dark: Poems on Mental Health and Healing, and the fifteenth edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. He holds degrees in Biology and Theatre Arts and a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University. He is a gay Mexican immigrant and first-generation high school and college graduate who teaches writing and literary translation in the M.F.A. program at The University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. Learn more at jarodriguez.org

May 16, 2026 Jim Reese virtual via Zoom

Jim Reese is an associate professor of English and director of the Great Plains Writers’ Tour at Mount Marty University in Yankton, South Dakota. He spent fourteen years in residency for the National Endowment for the Arts’ interagency initiative with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, where he established Yankton Federal Prison Camp’s first creative writing and publishing workshop. He is the author of eight books, including the nonfiction collection Bone Chalk, and has received several awards for his writing and public service.

June 6, 2026 Leah Umansky virtual via Zoom

Leah Umansky is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. She is the creator of the STAY BRAVE Substack, which encourages women-identifying creatives to inspire other women-identifying creatives to stay brave in their creative pursuits. Her creative work has been featured on PBS and The Slowdown podcast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A Day, The Nation, POETRY, Bennington Review, and American Poetry Review. She is an educator and writing coach who has taught workshops to all ages at such places as The New York Public Library, The Guggenheim, Poets House, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and elsewhere. She is working on a fourth collection of poems ORDINARY SPLENDOR, on wonder, joy, and love. She can be found at leahumansky.com