BRATTLEBORO-On Saturday, Sept. 13, at 3 p.m., ByWay Books & More, 399 Canal St., hosts Terry Hauptman and Toni Ortner as they showcase their latest published poetry. They are longtime friends who have often partnered in poetry readings.
Ortner grew up in Woodmere, Long Island, and now lives in Vermont. She has had 33 books published by small presses, most recently, The Vincent van Gogh Notebooks, published by Dancing Girl Press & Studio.
She hosts the Putney Public Library Writers Salon, a series that includes poets and fiction authors. Ortner was the vice president of Write Action, a nonprofit group that supports writers in southern Vermont through events, contests, and publications. Her writing has long appeared in Vermont Views under "Old Lady Blog." She has taught in several colleges and university English departments and has won grants from Pen America and the Author's League.
Claudia Putnam reflects on Ortner's latest collection: "In this imagistic meditation on 32 van Gogh paintings, Toni Ortner brings you into the paintings and then often zooms out so we encounter them as we might in a museum. [...] Ortner shows us how van Gogh identifies with and is perhaps engulfed by his subjects, human or not."
Hauptman, a local Vermont poet and artist, has traveled and taught in many states. Shattered, published by North Star Press, is her eighth volume of poetry. She earned a master's degree in poetry from the University of New Mexico where she studied with poet laureate, Joy Harjo, and has a doctorate in interdisciplinary arts from Ohio University.
Hauptman reads her poetry and exhibits her luminous 5-by-40-foot "Songline Scrolls" nationally. She has taught world art, poetry, and ethnopoetics at universities and workshops. A few of her smaller paintings will be on display at ByWay Books for purchase as well.
Poet, essayist, translator and biographer, Rosanna Warren endorses Hauptman's latest poetry. "In Shattered, Terry Hauptman utters a collective wail, a lamentation, and a cry of rage. Collective, because she creates choruses with Lorca, Neruda, [and] Thelonius Monk [...] leaping across cultures and languages. Yet the voice in these chants is distinctly Hauptman's own: ecstatic, full-throated."
For more information, visit bywaybooks.co or call 802-490-8014.
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