archive:Laughing Hermit 1999-2000 | Laughing Hermit 1998-1999
Laughing Hermit 2001-2002		  
All readings take place at the Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, at 4:00pm 
9.23.2000
Anne Colwell & Marisa de los Santos [poems]
Anne Colwell is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware Parallel Program in Georgetown. Her book, Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop, was published by the University of Alabama Press in 1997. Her first book of poems, Believing Their Shadows, has been a finalist for the University of Wisconsin's Brittingham Prize, the Anhinga Prize, New Issues Poetry Prize and the Quarterly Review of Literature. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including, most recently, California Quarterly, Evansville Review, Phoebe, Eclectic Literary Forum, Southern Poetry Review, and Writer's Voice. Poetry is also at the heart of her research interests and she has published several essays concerning American poets, including an article in Conneticut Review on Anne Bradstreet and Affliction/Conversion Narrative and an article in Journal X about Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish." She lives in Milton, Delaware.

photo by Robin Hiteshew 
Marisa de los Santos was educated at the University of Virginia, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of Houston. Her first book of poems From the Bones Out was published in April 2000 in the University of South Carolina Press's James Dickey Contemporary Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Chelsea, among others. She has received a Delaware Arts Council Grant and a Rona Jaffe Writers Award. She is Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Delaware and lives with her husband David Teague and their young son Charles in Philadelphia. 
 
 
 
 
 

photo by Robin Hiteshew
10.21.2000
Paul Martin & Jerry Wemple [poems]
Paul Martin grew up in small towns in northeastern Pennsylvania, a first generation American of Slovak immigrant parents. He attended St. Francis College of Loretto and received an MA from Niagara University. Twice a recipient of a poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he has authored two collections of poetry, Green Tomatoes and Walking Away Waving (Yarrow 1998). His work has been included in several anthologies including Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing From the New World, Carrying the Darkness: Poetry of the Vietnam War among others. His poems have appeared in numerous journals including Green Mountains Review, Kansas Quarterly, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Humanities Review and Yankee. His current manuscript Closing Distances, was twice finalist in the National Poetry Series.
Jerry Wemple's first collection of poetry, You Can See It from Here, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa and Terry Blackhawk for the 1999 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. It was published by Lotus Press of Detroit. Jerry Wemple grew up in the central Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania, and spent part of his childhood in southwest Florida. He served in the US Navy and later worked as a newspaper reporter in the Boston area. He holds an MFA in English from the University of Massachusetts. After a near 20-year absence, he returned to the Susquehanna Valley to teach at Bloomsburg University. His poetry and reviews have appeared in several publications including West Branch, 5 AM, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Mudville Diaries, an anthology of literary writing about baseball. He also received a Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

 photo by Robin Hiteshew
11.18.2000
Ken Kalfus & Toby Olson
Ken Kalfus is the author of two collections of stories: Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies. Both titles were a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Thirst was one of Salon's best books of 1998 and one of the Village Voice's Top Twenty. Pu-239, written when Kalfus lived in Moscow from 1994 to 1998, was a finalist for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award. The title story has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize. Ken Kalfus is also the editor of a collection of articles, Christopher Morley's Philadelphia, and he lives in Center City.  

photo by Robin Hiteshew

Toby Olson, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, has published eight books of fiction and twenty-two books of poetry. His work has appeared in over two hundred newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. Olson's novles include At Sea, Dorit in Lesbos, Utah and The Woman Who Escaped from Shame. He lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and North Truro, Massachusetts.  

photo by Robin Hiteshew
12.9.2000
Alumni of the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts
A reading by Alumni of the Pennylvania Governor's School for the Arts, organized by poet Deb Burnham, Chair of the Writing Department at the School. Featuring readings and poems by Sarah Schecter, Kevin Dugan, Collyn Hinchey, Amy Knight, Nicholas Hall, Kacie Fagan, Lauren Kubiak, Sarah Smith, Rebecca Steffy, Sara Watson, Alison Shaffer, and Dan Klotz. The Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts offers a five week summer scholarship program for gifted high school students with sections in visual arts, dance, music, theater and writing.

photo by Robin Hiteshew
1.20.200
Geraldine Connolly & Elaine Terranova [poems]
Born in Greensburg, Pennsylvania in 1947, Geraldine Connolly grew up in Westmoreland County and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh. She worked on the staff of the Folger Shakespeare Library from 1971-1975 and attended graduate school at the University of Maryland where she received an M.A. She has received two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, one in 1987 and one in 1995. In 1988, she received a Works-in-Progress grant from the Maryland Arts Council and in 1990, a Maryland Arts Council Fellowship. She was the Margaret Bridgman Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and has held residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and the Chautauqua Institute. Her chapbook, A Red Room, was published by Heatherstone Press in 1988 and a full-length collection, Food for the Winter, by Purdue University Press in 1990. Province of Fire (Iris Press) appeared in 1998. She recently co-edited The Open Door: An Anthology of Work from Poet Lore. Her poems, reviews and essays have appeared widely in literary magazines, including Antioch Review, Chelsea, The Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest. She serves as executive editor of Poet Lore magazine. She teaches poetry at the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland, and at John Hopkins' Washington D.C. Graduate Writing Program. 

photo by Connie Reider
Elaine Terranova is the author of two books of poems, The Cult of the Right Hand (Doubleday, l99l), which won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Damages (Copper Canyon Press, l996). "The Choice," a poem from Damages, will appear on buses and subways in Philadelphia as part of the Poetry Societyâs Poetry in Motion project. Her translation of Euripidesâ Iphigenia at Aulis is part of Euripides 3 in the Penn Greek Drama Series (l998). She received a National Endowment in the Arts Fellowship in Literature in l997 and has won two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants. She held the Robert Frost Fellowship in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writersâ Conference in l992. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Parnassus and other magazines. A number of her poems have been anthologized. She teaches English and creative writing at the Community College of Philadelphia and at the Curtis Institute of Music. She was Bannister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in l996 and has taught poetry writing at the Writersâ Center of Chautauqua Institution, at the Rutgers University and Hofstra University Writers Conferences, and at the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival. 

photo by Robin Hiteshew 
2.17.2001
Brenda McMillan & Molly Russakoff
Brenda F. McMillan's poetry and fiction has appeared in The American Poetry review, Schuykill, and Callaloo, and she has work upcoming in Mad Poets Review. She has won many poetry contests and read in many area venues. She currently teaches English at Communicty College of Philadelphia.

photo by Jeff Whitlock

photo by Robin Hiteshew
3.24.2001
Henry Braun [poems] & Leonard Kress [poems]

photo by Robin Hiteshew
Leonard Kress was born in Toledo, Ohio and grew up in and around Philadelphia. He has studied religion at Temple, Slavic languages and literature at Indiana University and the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and writing at Columbia University. He has received grants in both poetry and playwriting from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. His poetry, fiction, and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, and Missouri Review. He has published one chapbook, The Centralia Mine Fire and one collection, Sapphoâs Apples. He currently teaches art history and religion and writing at Owens College in northwest Ohio and runs HarrowGate Press, a poetry, fine arts and book arts press, with printmaker Mania Dajnak in Perrysburg, Ohio. 

photo by Robin Hiteshew
4.14.2001
Julianna Baggott [poems] & J.C. Todd

photo by Robin Hiteshew
J.C. Todd is the author of two collections of poems, Entering Pisces (Pine Press, 1984) and Nightshade (Pine Press, 1995). She has been featured in many publications for both poetry and prose, including The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Review, and Puerto del Sol. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards in several states, as well as being recognized as a distinguished teacher artist. 

photo by Robin Hiteshew
5.5.2001
Catherine Savage Brosman & Dzvinia Orlowsky
Catharine Savage Brosman received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1991. The recipient of fellowships from the Delaware Division of Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale Foundation, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, she has placed poems and short stories in dozens of literary journals including Poetry, The Southern Review, Chelsea, Cream City Review, Quarterly West, as well as the acclaimed anthology Best American Poetry 2000. Catharine Savage Brosman's poetry collections are Places in Mind, Journeying from Canyon de Chelly, Abiding Winter, and Watering. She is also the author of The Shimmering Maya and Other Essays and a number of French literary studies. She is currently professor emerita at Tulane University and honorary research professor at the University of Sheffield in England.

photo by Robin Hiteshew.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books and a contributing editor to Agni and The Marlboro Review. She has taught as Faculty Fellow at the Mt. Holyoke Writers' Conference (South Hadley, Massachusetts), as well as the Boston Center for Adult Education (Boston, Massachusetts), Gemini Ink (San Antonio, Texas) and the Stonecaost Writers' Conference (University of Southern Maine). Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines including American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Field, Columbia, and The Massachusetts Review. Her translations and co-translations of contemporary Ukrainian poets appeared in an anthology entitled From Three Worlds: New Writing from the Ukraine published by Zephyr Press in 1996 (Somerville, Massachusetts). In 1992 Minatoby Press published her chapbook entitled Burying Dolls and both her full-length collections, A Handful of Bees (1994) and Edge of House (1999), were published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Dzvinia Orlowsky is a 1998 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council poetry grant as well as a 1999 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Professional Development grant.

photo of Dzvinia Orlowsky