This Year’s Event to Feature Readings from Three Poets
County College of Morris (CCM) will celebrate the publication of the 2019 issue of the “Journal of New Jersey Poets” and honor this year’s New Jersey Poets Prize recipient, Emari DiGiorgio, of Ventnor City with a reception on Thursday, April 18.
Emari DiGiorgio
The reception will feature a reading by DiGiorgio, along with readings by fellow “Journal of New Jersey Poets” contributors, Hugo dos Santos, of Newark, and Joanna Fuhrman, of Brooklyn. The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Art and Design Gallery in the Learning Resource Center on CCM’s Randolph campus, 214 Center Grove Road. The readers, in addition to other contributing writers to the journal, will have books for sale during the event.
The first issue of the “Journal of New Jersey Poets” was published by Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1975. To date, it is the only annual collection of poetry by authors who were either born, raised or have an association with the state. CCM has been home to the journal since 1990.
DiGiorgio is being presented with the 2019 New Jersey Poets Prize for her poem “The Cruelty of Angels.” She is also the author of “Girl Torpedo,” the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and “The Things a Body Might Become.” She is the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet, the senior reviews editor for “Tupelo Quarterly,” and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City.
Dos Santos is a Luso-American writer, editor and translator. He is the author of “Then, there,” a collection of Newark stories from Spuyten Duyvil, and the translator of “A Child in Ruins,” the collected poems of José Luís Peixoto. Hugo has been awarded fellowships by the MacDowell Colony and the Disquiet International Literary Program. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won a Write Well Award, and has appeared or is forthcoming in “Barrelhouse, Electric Literature,” “Hobart,” “Puerto del Sol,” “The Common,” “The Fanzine” and elsewhere. Hugo is co-founder of the Brick City Collective and associate editor at “DMQ Review.”
Fuhrman is the author of five books of poetry, most recently “The Year of Yellow Butterflies” and “Pageant.” New poems from her appear in current or forthcoming issues of “ACM,” “Boog City,” “Conduit,” “Fence,” “Hanging Loose” and “The Saint Ann’s Review.” She teaches creative writing at Rutgers and in private workshops.
Poets who have read at CCM include such national figures as Allen Ginsberg, James Wright, Stephen Dobyns, Ishmael Reed and the United States Consultants in Poetry/U.S. Poets Laureate William Stafford, Howard Nemerov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Hall and Philip Levine.
For more information, email journalofnjpoets@ccm.edu or visit https://journalofnjpoets.org/.
