Local Writers Series Presents: A Reading with Bonnie Jill Emanuel, Martin Torgoff, and Gillian Lynn Katz (in person at HVWC)

Join us in person at the Hudson Valley Writers Center as we welcome Bonnie Jill Emanuel, Martin Torgoff, and Gillian Lynn Katz as they read from their most recent books. Books will be available for purchase on site.

Bonnie Jill Emanuel’s debut collection, Glitter City., was released earlier this year with Cornerstone Press.  Her poetry appears in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other publications.  She is the recipient of the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Irwin and Alice Stark Poetry Prize from The City College of New York.  She is a Pushcart Prize and Best-of-the-Net nominee, and was named a finalist the Idaho Prize for Poetry (Lost Horse Press), the Hilary Tham Capital Collection (Word Works), the Off The Grid Prize (Grid Books), and more.  Emanuel is a longtime reader for Bellevue Literary Review.

Martin Torgoff is an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, documentary filmmaker, and Emmy-nominated writer, producer, and director of television with over forty years of experience. He’s also an editor and literary coach/consultant par excellence. His career began at the age of twenty-two, when he was hired as Associate Editor of Grosset & Dunlap Publishers in New York, which brought him into the literary world. He specialized in illustrated works of non-fiction like The Woody Guthrie Songbook, which became the definitive collection of Guthrie’s music, writing and art; at Grosset he also edited books by celebrities as diverse as Charles Chaplin (My Life in Pictures), Reggie Jackson (The Reggie Jackson Scrapbook), and Liberace (The Things I Love). After leaving publishing to become an author, his first book was a bestseller about Elvis Presley and his family, Elvis: We Love You Tender (Delacorte, 1980), which brought him to the attention of artist Andy Warhol. He became a Contributing Editor of Warhol’s magazine, Interview, where his many cover stories about people like Jack Nicholson, Yoko Ono, Stevie Wonder and Joan Didion appeared until Warhol’s death in 1987. His next book, American Fool (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), a portrait of recording artist John Mellencamp, was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Prize for excellence in music journalism. It was Mellencamp who brought Torgoff into the world of film and television during the heyday of MTV, where his work as a writer/director spanned the world of music and included artists as diverse as Prince, Billy Joel, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith, the Highwaymen, Phillip Glass and Ravi Shankar. In 1987 he wrote the award-winning Elvis ’56, acclaimed by Rolling Stone as one of the best documentaries ever produced on a rock and roll figure. In 2004, after twelve years of research and writing, he published Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age (Simon & Schuster), a landmark narrative cultural history of illicit drugs in America, and turned the book into The Drug Years, a multi-part documentary series that became one of the most successful in the history of VH-1. His feature-length documentary for VH-1, Planet Rock: The Story of Hip-Hop and the Crack Generation, received Emmy nominations for Outstanding Arts & Culture Programming and Outstanding Achievement in a Craft: Writing. In 2017, he published another critically acclaimed work of non-fiction, Bop Apocalypse: Jazz, Race, the Beats and Drugs (DaCapo Press), and is presently developing more books and television series, among them a memoir. Although best known for his work in the fields of music and American popular culture, over the span of his forty-year career his work has encompassed art, film, theater, dance, literature, history, politics, race, sociology, media studies, sports, business, lifestyle, travel, technology, humor, sex, spirituality, recovery, and celebrity culture.