Zoom Reading: Poets of the North Country with Philip Memmer, Willa Carroll & Steven Huff

Please join HVWC and poet & SHP Advisory Committee member, Estha Weiner, as we welcome three wonderful poets from Upstate New York to read on Zoom on Sunday June 30th from 4-5:30pm. Each poet will read and engage with the audience for a Q&A.

Philip Memmer is the author of six books of poems, most recently Cairns (Lost Horse Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poetry London, and Mid-American Review, in many anthologies, in the Library of Congress’s “Poetry 180” website, and in Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” column. He lives in upstate New York, where he serves as the YMCA of Central New York’s District Executive Director for Arts and Education, and where he founded the Downtown Writers Center in 2001. He was the recipient of a 2023 Individual Artist Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts, serves as Publisher at Tiger Bark Press, and teaches creative writing at Hamilton College.

Willa Carroll’s debut full-length poetry collection, Nerve Chorus (The Word Works), was noted in The Common as a “meticulously choreographed treatment of life as art.” Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poem-A-Day, Tin House, The Slowdown and elsewhere. She won Narrative Magazine’s Third Annual Poetry Contest and Tupelo Quarterly’s TQ7 Poetry Prize, judged by Brenda Hillman. Her chapbook, Demolition Suite, was a finalist for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize and selected for the Split Rock Press Chapbook Series. Carroll’s poetry videos and multimedia collaborations have been featured in EcoTheo Review, Interim, Narrative, and TriQuarterly. Awarded Best Poetry Film at the International Migration and Environment Film Festival, her work has screened at numerous international festivals. After earning degrees from Bennington and living in NYC for twenty-five years, she’s currently based in upstate, NY. willacarroll.com

Steven Huff is the author of a new book of nonfiction, Resting among Us: Authors’ Gravesites in Upstate New York. A Pushcart Prize winner in fiction, he is the author of two collections of stories, most recently, Blissful and Other Stories, and three collections of poetry, most recently A Fire in the Hill. He teaches fiction in the Solstice Low Residency MFA program at Lasell University in Boston and lives in Rochester. The founder of Tiger Bark Press, he now publishes an online newsletter, The Moveable Marquee: Notes on Classic Cinema.