Poetry: Emerging Women

In the first segment of a new series, New River spotlights poetry of four emerging women poets. They hail from the West, the Midwest, the East, and the Middle East; what they have in common is sensational talent and very different, startlingly original voices.

Jeannine Hall Gailey’s first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books in 2006. Poems from the book were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her second book, She Returns to the Floating World, will be released in 2011 by Kitsune Books. Melissa Range’s Horse and Rider won the Walt McDonald Prize, and is the recipient of a 2007 "Discovery"/The Nation Award and a 2006 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Image, The Paris Review, and Poetry London (UK). Darcie Dennigan is currently writer-in-residence at UConn; she won the Poets Out Loud Prize for her poetry collection Corinna A–Maying the Apocalypse, published by Fordham University Press in 2008, and was also recipient of a 2007 "Discovery"/The Nation Award. Reena Ribalow, who lives in Jerusalem, has won a host of literary prizes including the Keats Poetry Prize, The Margaret Reid Poetry Prize, and The Golden Prize, as well as the Moment Magazine and the Stand Magazine Short Story Competitions. Her work has been published in The Jerusalem Review, Ariel, The New York Quarterly, Shirim and The Literary Review, among others.

The poems are read by Patricia Randell, one of New York’s finest actresses, who has been hailed myriad times by reviewers – including on five occasions by The New York Times – and who has been described with the phrase “there is no more authentic actress on the New York stage than she”; Lori Myers, who starred in the long-running hit NY production of Our Town, of whom The New Yorker magazine said “No one is more brilliant at conveying the layers of a character than Lori Myers”; and Randell Haynes, whose 25-year career spans theatre, television, and film, in regional theatres across America and in films such as Glory, Radioland Murders, and HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon.

The Program (25 minutes):

Jeannine Hall Gailey (read by Patricia Randell)
-Female Comic Book Superheroes
-The Conversation

Melissa Range (read by Randell Haynes)
-The Rope
-The Shield

Darcie Dennigan (read by Lori Myers)
-Eleven Thousand and One

Reena Ribalow (read by Patricia Randell)
-Desert Light
-Jerusalem of Heaven, Jerusalem of Earth

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