Poetry & Prose Tuesdays

Writing & Poetry is now called
Poetry & Prose

PathwaysARTS Weekly Poetry & Prose Event is led by
RON SLATE.
Ron invites featured readers from who join live or via zoom from all over the country. We have themes and prompts and open mics.
Join our Poetry & Prose email list for insider info!
Sign up to read when you come in or contact us HERE

READINGS START 7:30pm – 9pm
DOORS OPEN 7 pm

(See Past P&P Events and Videos Here)

A note from Ron Slate, our Host of P&P.
“Niki Patton and I have collaborated on devising a prompt/theme for our readings on the evening of March 10.
Niki’s initial suggestion was “Who I Used To Be.” In such a piece, one might recall a former time, place and situation where one’s profession or interests or responsibilities or relationship(s) reflect a persona or livelihood or existence that differs in some profound way from where one finds oneself now.
But also, as I added, a question often arises: have I really changed at all?

The recalled situation could be one that needed to be abandoned — or one that shaped who you are now, even as it is impossible to be the person you were back then.

We invite you to prepare a piece (prose or poem) 7 – 10 minutes maximum reading time, to read on March 10.
Also, the members of Niki’s “Writers Read” group will join us at the Tavern with their responses to the prompt.
With gratitude for your work…Ron Slate”

Please let us know if you plan to read.

Midsummer Count collects the best work of Robin Becker, considered by many to be the foremost feminist poet of her generation. With selections from each of her previously published books and nearly thirty new poems, readers enter Becker’s lifelong exploration of childhood, animals, cherished places, complex friendships, and romantic intimacy. A life-affirming current yokes these narratives across time, even as a sister’s early suicide haunts the decades. In blank and free verse, in couplets, quatrains, and sonnets, the poet wrestles formal tensions, creating a present-day idiom for beauty, grief, and compassion. Lovers of Becker’s work and those new to it will find in Midsummer Count a master class by one of today’s most dynamic poets.

She is known for her work in Lesbian and Gay Studies and served as a visiting scholar at the Center for Lesbian and Gay studies at the CUNY in 1998. She has said, ‘Feminist scholarship and gay and lesbian poetry have provided me with the tools with which to work.’ Her collections of poetry develop precise, delicate imagery and… depict her own transition from girlhood to womanhood… Maxine Kumin has also been a tremendous inspiration to Becker…[she] learned that ‘woman poets could celebrate their lives and not position themselves as victims in every story.’ “^[7]

CLICK TO GO TO THE JANUARY- MARCH EDITION
OF ON THE SEA WALL

On The Seawall is a community gallery for new writing and commentary during a time of emergency. (There always is, and there always has been, an emergency.) We now publish on a bimonthly schedule, and we read submissions throughout the year.
We think of On The Seawall as a “gallery” — a location in the neighborhood, a place where we display our work for our community, where everyone is welcome to create and to witness the work. We are living in a time of emergency during which our art may act as performances of intervention and refuge. Back in 2007, I named this site On The Seawall for a reason — because there always is an emergency, communal and/or personal, requiring a stay against the flood.

New books come to Pathways
regularly.
Courtesy of Ron Slate of On The Seawall, these books are all new or recently published. The genres are poetry, fiction and nonfiction; and they’re free! You can keep a book, or pass it along. New titles will be continuously added. Ron is the moderator for our Poetry & Prose Series.

PAST P&P EVENTS

Click on posters to see videos from that night.
You can ask if you don’t see what you want to watch.

January 13th, 2026
Ellen Martin Story is a poet and quilter who washed-ashore some years ago with her husband Melvin after retiring from a career in human resources management. She is a member of Cleaveland House Poets. Her debut poetry collection, Corner Pocket, was published in January 2025. Ellen is an island resident and read LIVE at Pathways

January 6th, 2026
Poet, translator, editor and teacher, Philip Metres is the author of 12 books, most recently Fugitive/Refuge in which he follows the journey of his refugee ancestors—from Lebanon to Mexico to the United States—in a vivid exploration of what it means to long for home. A book-length qasida, the collection draws on both ancient traditions and innovative forms—odes and arabics, sonnets and cut-ups, prayers and documentary voicings, heroic couplets and homophonic translations—in order to confront the perils of our age: forced migration, climate change, and toxic nationalism

December 16th
Sue Guiney joined us live at Pathways

Sue Guiney is a novelist, poet, and educator whose work has appeared in literary
journals and anthologies across both sides of the Atlantic.
She began her publishing journey with Dreams of May, a poetry play released in 2006 and
reissued in a second edition in 2013. Her first full-length poetry collection, Her Life Collected,
followed in 2011 (both by Ward Wood Publishing, London).

In addition to poetry, Sue has written four novels, including a trilogy centered on post-war Cambodia. Inspired by her time in Cambodia, Sue founded Writing Through (www.writingthrough.org), an international educational non-profit that uses creative writing to develop thinking skills, language fluency, and self-esteem.

After thirty years in London, Sue now resides full-time on Martha’s Vineyard. She holds a
Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University, where she majored in both English and Classics.
She went on to obtain a Master of Arts degree in Classics, with a focus on Greek Tragedy, from
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

See videos from Caren’s night here.

Poet Hank Lazer, via Zoom, read from Abundant Life, his new & selected poetry collection & from What Were You Thinking, his new book of essays. Open Mic followed.

See videos from this night.

Click poster below to see videos from this night

Adriana Stimola is a year round West Tisbury resident (with summer roots back to1989) and is a writer and literary agent. Her poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including: the Santa Clara Review, the San Pedro River Review, Driftwood Press, Harbor Review, Slipstream and Soundings East. She sits on the Literary Arts Advisory Committee at Featherstone Center for the Arts and is the current West Tisbury Poet Laureate. She minored in poetry at Emerson College (2006). Most recently, she was a finalist in the New Millennium Writings 59th flash fiction contest and has been accepted into the PocketMFA poetry program.

2024 -2025 Season

Maritime Memoirs will be our last Poetry & Prose night of our season. There was zoom this night. Live at Pathways only.

Scroll below for our 2024 – 2025 Season recordings

Click here to jump to our 2023 -2024 Season recordings

This page has 2023-2024 and back to 2020 Poetry & Prose Nights

https://us05web.zoom.us/j/81243493155

click posters to see recordings

Elaine Sexton’s new book of poems is Site Specific: New & Selected Poems. She lives in New York and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. Elaine will read live for us at Pathways.

“Elaine Sexton enlarges on what Modernism observed,” writes Joyce Peseroff of Sexton’ s fourth collection, Drive, pointing to the qualities and breadth of her work as an artist, editor, essayist, and poet. With Site Specific, Sexton’ s new and selected poems, readers will witness the formation of a poet and artist whose work evolves thrillingly with each new publi

Sharon Seibel, MD, is an educator, psychiatrist, and health and wellness advocate for midlife women. Her memoir, Beating the Odds, Lessons Learned from Pancreatic Cancer, is due out soon. She is the Associate Editor of The Hot Years Magazine and co-author of Working Through Menopause: The Impact on Women, Businesses, and the Bottom Line.

March 18, 2025 Novelist MD Semel returned to read from his now completed novel. Semel spent thirteen years as a Legal Aid lawyer in the Bronx. He was also a college professor and taught classes in law, Criminology and terrorism. He earned his PhD at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The World Is Yours is his first novel.
In the chapter he will read, Mary, the mother of one of the main characters, travels to Rikers Island (the NYC jail complex) to visit her son.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Lotería (Texas Review Press, 2023), and the essay collection Before the Earth Devours Us (Split/Lip Press, 2021). His work has appeared in New England Review, Seneca Review, Colorado Review, Adroit Journal, Poetry Daily, and American Life in Poetry. He is the interviews editor at the EcoTheo Review, senior book reviews editor at Tupelo Quarterly, and associate poetry editor at AGNI. With Jennifer De Leon and Ben Black, he coedited To Never Have Risked Our Lives: An AGNI Portfolio of Central American and Mexican Diaspora Writing. He lives with his family in south Texas.
Click Photo to see some of Esteban’s work

Ukrainian American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky received an NEA Translation Fellowship for the co-translation of Ukrainian poet Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living published in 2024. Her own 7th book of poems, Those Absences Now Closest, also appeared last year. She will read from both collections.

“In Those Absences Now Closest Dzvinia Orlowsky is a witness, never a bystander, ready to stare down the demons, to “cut yourself with a dull razor.” She sets up house among the nightmares of intergenerational trauma and, as far as anyone can, humanizes them. Through her work, Orlowsky prompts us to enter our own histories instead of just watching.”s a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, and a Four Way Books founding editor.

She has authored seven poetry colle

www.dzviniaorlowsky.com <http://www.dzviniaorlowsky.com/>

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/T/bo237305388.html

https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/lost-in-living/

Tuesday January 7th, 2025. Bridget Muller-Sampson
Bridget Muller-Sampson earned her M.F.A. in Fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont and her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia. She lives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, where she runs an inn and a restaurant with her husband and her two rescue border collies.

Her short stories and essays have been published in The Galway Review, CutLeaf Journal, Northern New England Review and Consequence. Her stories have also been published and recognized by Ruminate magazine as the winner of the 2022 Waking Flash Prose Prize and by Dappled Things as the winner of the 2018 J.F. Powers Short Story Award. This past winter, she earned a residency at Yaddo, where she worked on her memoir-in-progress, called The Year I Farmed.

Heather Treseler – Live at Pathways – author of the new award-winning poetry collection Auguries and Divinations (Bauhan Publishing). Heather just won the New England Poetry Book Club’s award for best book of poems by a NE poet / https://www.heathertreseler.com/.
She will talk about her influences and the state of poetry during turbulent times like ours.
She teaches at Worcester State and is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Research Center,

Auguries & Divinations tracks a young woman’s coming of age, attuned to the unspoken liabilities in women’s lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. An older woman becomes the narrator’s Beatrice in love and survival, and she returns to the New England of her childhood ready to claim a life of her own making, drawing on the classical practice of augury, or observing birds to discern human fate.

In this debut essay collection, Laura Marris reframes environmental degradation by setting aside the conventional, catastrophic framework of the Anthropocene in favor of that of the Eremocene, the age of loneliness, marked by the dramatic thinning of wildlife populations and by isolation between and among species. She asks: How do we add to archives of ecological memory? How can we notice and document what’s missing in the landscapes closest to us? Vivid, keenly observed, and driven by a lively and lyrical voice, The Age of Loneliness is a moving examination of the dangers of loneliness, the surprising histories of ecological loss, and the ways that community science—which relies on the embodied evidence of “ground truth”—can help us recognize, and maybe even recover, what we’ve learned to live without. Reviews in LARB, Los Angeles Times, BOMB, Chicago Review of Books, On The Seawall, Publishers Weekly (starred review), Ursula Mag, Shelf Awareness.
“An undeniably profound elucidation of losses. . . . [Marris’s] approach counters the colonial, the destructive, the industrial. The Age of Loneliness holds up a reflection whereby we, too, grieve the sometimes invisible losses that we have been bequeathed.”—Anita Felicelli, Los Angeles Times

On Tuesday November 19th James Jennings,of Martha’s Vineyard, joined us again this season.
Ron Slate, our host for these Tuesday Nights says, “If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading his spirited novel Wings of Red, we recommend that you take a look.” Here’s a link to a piece Ron Slate wrote about it in his online Journal. — https://bit.ly/48LiOcZ

Click on posters to see videos from that night.

2023 – 2024 Writing & Poetry Events

Kimberly Grey’s new essay collection is A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing. She has published two books of poetry. She teaches at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster PA

“Ingenious out of necessity, A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing, centers around the scapegoating and exile of the author by her mother. In these essays, Kimberly Grey harnesses her formidable intellectual and creative resources to create coherence for an unstable, traumatized self. To do so, she calls on-beseeches-dozens of brilliant thinkers and artists for help, among them Etel Adnan, Roland Barthes, John Cage, Anna Freud, Mina Loy, Elaine Scarry, Gertrude Stein, and Simone Weil. Grey’s engagement with these figures (and many others) is part of her effort to stabilize, if not fully comprehend, the inconceivability of her maternal banishment. By thinking her pain rather than feeling it, Grey becomes an expert witness to her own trauma, a ponderer of motherhood even as her identity as daughter has been rescinded”–

Awotunde Judyie Ella Al-Bilali is a theater maker, arts educator and writer. Currently a Professor at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, she has taught internationally, notably as a Fulbright Scholar in South Africa where she founded a theater company, Brown Paper Studio. Judyie is the author of two books, For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town, a memoir about her experiences living abroad and Halcyon Days, a book of haiku poetry published by Indian Hill Press. Her work is featured in the award-winning, bestselling book Black Acting Methods: A Critical Approach.

March 5th, Sean Dougherty

Sean Thomas Dougherty is a writer and poet who works as an EMT. . His short pieces on his job are unblinking and sensitive. He lives with his family in Erie, PA along the US’s northern rim.

In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood.

Dougherty is the author or editor of 20 books including Death Prefers the Minor Keys: a Publisher’s Weekly top ten new release in poetry, published by BOA Editions in 2023.
Recent awards include the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize, and an Established Artist Fellowship for Western Pennsylvania.

Click posters for available videos

Ellen Birkett Morris’s novel Beware the Tall Grass is the winner of the Donald L.Jordan Award for Literary Excellence, judged by Lan Samantha Chang, and will be published in March 15, 2024 by CSU Press. She is the author of LostGirls: Short Stories, winner of the PencraftAward. Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre DameReview, and South Carolina Review, among other journals.

Poets Susan Aizenberg, Betsy Scholl & Leslie Ullman
joined via Zoom

Some questions that Ron Slate posed to the trio – how do you work with each other to improve your work? For each of you, which aspects of improvement are most urgent? How long do your poems remain in the state of revision?
Over time we try out new strategies, forms, sounds — how do you help each other to evolve? Is the intimacy of friendship necessary for impactful critique (so no feelings get hurt) or do you think critique is open to everyone to some degree?

Susan Aizenberg’s newest collection, A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems, is forthcoming in University of New Mexico Press’s Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series (August 2024). She’s also the author of Quiet City (BkMk 2015) and Muse (SIUP 2002) and co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The
Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP 2001.) Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Plume, SWWIM, On the Seawall, and elsewhere.

Leslie Ullman’s In acclaimed poet Leslie Ullman’s fifth and newest book, she offers a glorious hybrid collection of essays, poems, and writing exercises. Inviting writers and serious readers into the spaces poetry can open up around us and inside us, Library Of Small Happiness focuses on aspects of craft while embracing a holistic approach that makes accessible the unique intelligence of poetry.

Betsy Sholl’s latest book release is, As If A Song Could Save You.
“Attuned as she is to harmony—musical, spiritual, earthly—Sholl weaves seemingly miscellaneous notes into vibrant wholes. She references Dante more than once and it’s apt, for she is very much a pilgrim, someone who conveys the feeling of being in it—the tangle that is a moment…” Baron Wormser. She teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.

In, Packing My Library, the Argentine writer Alberto Manguel said of his books, “I’ve often felt that my library explained who I was, gave me a shifting self that transformed itself constantly throughout the years.”

When Indiana University professor and writer Christoph Irmscher visited the Max Eastman House in Aquinnah to catalog the library there for scholars, he discovered much about Eastman — and about personal libraries. He has pictures to prove it.

Christoph spoke about his days there — he refered to his essay on the subject — but he’ll be speaking, not reading except for a few excerpts.

Max Eastman (1883-1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. He was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for many causes. He founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts. More on Eastman.

Tuesday, December 12th
We asked our friend, Donald Nitchie, to create a prompt for poems to be presented live and via zoom at Pathways.

There was no zoom this evening

Jenny Slate is an American actress, stand-up comedian, and writer. Following early acting and stand-up roles on television, Slate gained recognition for her live variety shows in New York City and for co-creating, writing, and producing the children’s short film and book series Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2010–present). She became more widely known as a cast member on the 35th season of the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live between 2009 and 2010, followed by subsequent roles in the comedic series Bob’s Burgers (2012–present), Parks and Recreation (2013–2015), House of Lies (2013–2015), and Kroll Show (2013–2015).
Slate and her father Ron Slate co-wrote a book titled About the House about their time living in Slate’s childhood home in Milton, Massachusetts, which was published in December 2016. She published her book titled Little Weirds, about her struggles with and thoughts about life and relationships, in 2019.

She read from her book currently in the works.

Ben Shattuck is an American writer, painter, and curator. Born in Massachusetts, he received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has written one book and a number of short stories. One of his short stories, “The History of Sound”, was developed into an as-yet-unreleased film. Shattuck is also a painter. His first book, Six Walks, was published in 2022. The memoir tracks the author’s retracing of six walks taken by Henry David Thoreau, which brings about personal memories and emotional insights.^[9][10] It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. In 2021, Shattuck and his brother bought the general store in their hometown, Davolls General Store, which was originally built in 1793.

He read from his work in process.

Read a recent review in the MV Times by Kate Feiffer

CLICK FOR MORE INFO ON JENNINGS’ BOOK

On JWJ From Le Porte Peinte ( LPP )… James W. Jennings, 36, is a renaissance man, a writer and painter. His paintings are inspired by storytelling, faith in things unseen, connectedness, and process. The “vibes/ondes“ which provide the connective strength in many of his recent works pay homage to those that gave him the opportunity to envision and pursue his dreams.

JWJ in R.Legacy : “You don’t have to be an ‘artist’ to be an artist. Your actions communicate who you are. When you look at my artwork, you’re looking at a form of communication. I want to communicate that invisible bond between us. In other words, I want to say, we all are one, its all about love, get over yourselves.”

Bill Eville is the editor of the Vineyard Gazette. His book Washed Ashore: Family, Fatherhood and Finding Home on Martha’s Vineyard was published in May 2023 by Godine. His writing has been featured in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, This American Life, and The Moth, among many other outlets. He lives in West Tisbury with his wife, Cathlin, and children, Hardy and Pickle.

Ty McDonald, Vineyard Haven storyteller and poet, debuts a multimedia production called, A Bridge in the Fog, consisting of his recent original poems recorded with collaborative vocals and musical contributions. Ty is the producer and host of the video/audio series, The Jalapeño, featuring conversations with artists, musicians, writers, entrepreneurs, and other interesting people.

friedman read from their co-authored book, The collections and is series co-editor of Best Microfiction. Jeff Friedman has published seven poetry collections.

Warren Woessner, a Cleaveland House poet, will read from his work. His recent poetry collection is Exit Sky.

Meg Pokrass
is the author of six flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, two novellas-in-flash, and a new prose collection, Spinning to Mars, recipient of the Blue Light Book Award in 2020. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, Wigleaf, Waxwing, and McSweeney’s, among others. She is the Series Founder and Co-Editor of Best Microfiction.

Jeff Friedman
eighth book, The Marksman, was published in November 2020 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has received numerous awards and prizes for his poetry, mini tales, and translations, including a National Endowment Literature Translation Fellowship in 2016 and two individual Artist Grants from New Hampshire Arts Council. Two of his micro stories were recently selected for the Best Microfiction 2021 anthology.