PUTNEY — Next Stage Arts Project presents Green Writers Press' fourth annual Earth Day Celebration/Reading on Friday, April 26, at 7 p.m. There is a $10 suggested donation to benefit Next Stage's education programs.
Green Writers Press is a locally-grown Vermont publisher with a global reach and sphere of influence in creative arts and letters that extends beyond the mountains of Vermont.
The evening will feature short readings by Vermont authors (and some from out-of-state), book signings, and cake.
The line-up includes Water Wetherell, Bianca Stone, Tim Weed, Chard deNiord, Gary Margolis, Shanta Lee and Maclean Gander, Cassie Fancher, Ehris and Velya Urban-Jancz, Neile Parisi, Stevie Z. Fischer, James Crews, Bill Mares, Sarah Wolfson, Charity Gingerich, Nancy Kilgore, Brian Adams, Marilyn Neagley, and Sarah Ward.
GWP founder Dede Cummings will host the event. In a news release, she noted some of the writers on the evening's bill:
• Brian Adams, whose book Offline she described as “a romantic romp through the dark underbelly of technology.” Equally parts serious and ridiculous, Adams' book gently pokes fun at the perils and pitfalls of the online world.
• Cassie Fancher, whose debut collection of stories, Street of Widows, earned her the 2018 Howard Frank Mosher First Novel/Short Story Collection Book Prize. Fancher “writes about small town American women as they navigate grief and loss,” and the relationships they find in order to survive.
• Stevie Z. Fischer, whose River Rules, a small-town suspense novel she described as having “a deep heart and powerful conscience.” The book reveals a New England community under attack by environmental exploitation as old rivalries flare and friendships are threatened by treachery.
• Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont and author of five books of poetry, most recently Interstate, The Double Truth, and Night Mowing. His book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets, Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on Twentieth Century American Poets, was published by Marick Press in 2011.
• Bianca Stone, a poet and visual artist, is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014), Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Books, 2016), and multiple chapbooks.
• Tim Weed, author of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing (just out in paperback), whose stories “speak to the inextricability of exterior and interior experience; to the powerful magnetism of solitude versus friendship, brotherhood, and love; and to the urgent need for a more direct engagement with the planet that sustains us.”
• Walter Wetherell, a master storyteller, recently published a fifth collection of stories, Where We Live. The stories “illumine contemporary American life and culture by focusing on the forgotten places and people living on the edges, from a young Somali immigrant who finds an unlikely mentor in his attempt to come to terms with his new home, to a widower faced with the everyday challenges of his first day alone.”