Celebrating Poetry at Peconic Landing
Poets & Writers magazine, based in New York City, is bringing festivities to Greenport this month for a celebration of young women poets from the region.
The magazine’s celebration of its Amy Award will take place at Peconic Landing on Sunday, June 2 at 3 p.m.
Hosted by Paula Trachtman and Ed Butscher of Peconic Landing, the event will be an afternoon of poetry and music, with an impressive lineup of poets and performers.
The public is invited and admission is free.
The Amy Award was established in 1995 by Ms. Trachtman and Mr. Butscher, in memory of Ms. Trachtman’s daughter, Amy Elisabeth Rothholz, an aspiring actor and poet who died at age 25.
The award in her memory furthers the careers of young women poets, age 30 and under, living in the New York City metropolitan area or on Long Island. Many winners of the Amy Award, which is administered by Poets & Writers, have gone on to impressive careers in poetry and fiction.
Ms. Rothholz’s poetry will be read by Mercedes Ruehl, the Academy Award and Tony Award–winning actress who recently appeared on Broadway in the revival of Torch Song Trilogy.
Joining Ms. Ruehl to celebrate the Amy Award will be singer, songwriter, author, and activist Sandy Rapp. Many noteworthy poets have been invited to read, including several who are members of the local community.
Several of the readers are residents of Peconic Landing, as is Galen Williams, who founded Poets & Writers in 1970. Both Ms. Williams and Elliot Figman, executive director of Poets & Writers, will be on hand for the celebration.
Readers include: Bill Batcher, the author of the poetry collections Footsteps to the Resurrection, Celebrations, and Imaginings; Edward Butscher, poet and author of eight books including acclaimed biographies of Sylvia Plath and Conrad Aiken, whose most recent collection is “Local Lexicon;” Fran Castan, author of “The Widow’s Quilt” and “Venice: City That Paints Itself,” whose many honors include a commendation in 2019 from the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine and the 2013 Long Island Poet of the Year honor bestowed by the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association; Harvey Feinstein, who studied with David Ignatow and was part of the Southhampton Library poetry program; Mattituck resident Kimiko Hahn, the author of nine books of poems, most recently “Brain Fever,” and is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York; Anne Marie Macari of Mattituck, the author of five books of poems, including “Red Deer” and a new collection, “Heaven Beneath,” due out from Persea Books in 2020, who founded and teaches in the MFA Program for Poetry & Poetry in Translation at Drew University; Joe McKay, the author of “Crazy About Words,” a collection of essays and poems on words and language whose poems have appeared in the Key West Citizen and several online outlets and Lindsay Adkins, a recipient of the 2018 Amy Award who recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing at Stony Brook Southampton.
A reception will follow the program.
