2020 Program (Postponed): 
12:30 p.m.—Poetry Reading hosted by Sharon Israel / Featured Poet Jared Daniel Fagen
1:30 p.m.—Publishing Panel moderated by Simona David / Group Discussion Addressing the Latest News and Trends in Publishing
Panelists include Leslie T. Sharpe (author and editor), Carrie Bradley Neves (editor), Andrew Flach (publisher, Hatherleigh Press), Brett Barry (publisher, Silver Hollow Audio)  
2:00 p.m.—Keynote Address with Beth Lisick, author of the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool 
3:00 p.m.— SPARK! with Lilly Golden and Lorrayne Bolger 
The Roxbury SPARK!:Art and Literary Magazine is the student-run magazine of Roxbury Central School. In its sixth year, this publication showcases creative works of students in fifth through twelve grades, including paintings, drawings, photographs, poems, short stories, and even novellas and plays. SPARK! is produced by the students, for the students, to display, publish, and archive their work. The process of experimenting with writing, workshopping projects together and encouraging fellow student writers and artists makes the journey as meaningful as the final publication. 

3:30 p.m.— New Release with Anique Sara Taylor, author of Where Space Bends (Finishing Line Press), forthcoming in 2020 
4:00 p.m. — The Bounty of Books Raffle, with a prize of ten selected book titles, will be awarded (come early, tickets are limited!), and the winner of the Best Cover Contest will be announced.

Keynote Speaker: Beth Lisick  

Beth Lisick is a writer, actor, and the author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool. Her work has been published in various magazines and journals, including Best American Poetry. She co-founded San Francisco’s Porchlight storytelling series, traveled the country with the Sister Spit performance tours, and received a Creative Work Fund grant for a chapbook series with Creativity Explored, a San Francisco studio for artists with developmental disabilities. Beth has appeared in films that have screened at Cannes, Sundance, and the San Francisco International Film Festival. Her first novel Edie on the Green Screen was just published by 7.13 Books. Beth is a resident of Brooklyn and West Hurley. Her website is bethlisick.com.

 

Poetry Reading hosted by Sharon Israel / Featured Poet: Jared Daniel Fagen

Jared Daniel Fagan is the editor and publisher of Black Sun Lit, an independent press devoted to transgressive literature and aesthetic inquiry. His prose poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Entropy, The Collagist, Hyperion, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn and Arkville, NY.

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Sharon Israel hosts the radio program Planet Poet–Words in Space, an edition of The Writer’s Voice on WIOX 91.3 FM (also streaming online) in the Catskills. As a poet and soprano, Sharon collaborates with composer Robert Cucinotta on works for voice, live instruments, and electronics and has premiered several of his works in New York. She was an early recipient of Brooklyn College’s Leonard Hecht Poetry Explication Award. Her poem “Melodrama at the Biograph” was nominated for Sundress Publication’s “2016 Best of the Net.” Sharon’s debut chapbook Voice Lesson was published by Post Traumatic Press in 2017.

Publishing Panel: Simona David, Leslie T. Sharpe, Carrie Bradley Neves, Brett Barry, and Andrew Flach 

Simona David is a Communications and Public Relations Consultant as well as art writer living in the Catskill Mountains, New York. She is the author of Self-Publishing and Book Marketing, A Research Guide (2013), and How Art Is Made: In the Catskills (2017) as well as the publisher of Art in the Catskills. Simona is co-founder of the Greater Roxbury Business Association and former president of Writers in the Mountains. She holds a Master’s Degree in Communications from the University at Albany. Her website is simonadavid.com. 

 

Leslie T. Sharpe is an author, editor and educator. She is a Member of PEN American Center.
Sharpe is the author of Editing Fact and Fiction: A Concise Guide to Book Editing (Cambridge University Press), which is regarded as the “modern editing classic” as well as the publishing industry standard. Her essay, “On Writing Smart: Tips and Tidbits” is featured in The Business of Writing (Allworth, 2012). Sharpe’s most recent work, The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills (Overlook/Abrams, 2017), is the recipient of an Independent Book Publisher (IPPY) Gold Medal Award for Excellence. Her essays on nature and the environment are currently featured on Psychology Today’s online blog, “One World.” She was recently honored, for her work on the environment, by The Catskill Center for Preservation and Development as one of “Fifty Living Stewards of the Catskills.”
Sharpe has taught nonfiction writing in the undergraduate and graduate (MFA) writing programs of Columbia University. She also taught Introduction to Publishing and The Editorial Process at The City College of New York’s Publishing Certificate Program whose goal is to promote diversity within the book publishing industry. In addition, Sharpe taught Manuscript Editing at New York University’s Certificate Program in Book Publishing and taught The Nonfiction Book for the all-media website, mediabistro.com. Currently, Sharpe teaches with Writers in the Mountains (WIM), Roxbury, New York, her nature writing workshop, “Seeing Nature in Words,” and her seminar, “Book Proposal Basics.”

Sharpe was a regular contributor to New York Newsday’s “Urban ‘I’” column, for which she wrote pieces that portrayed urban life, focusing primarily on the theme of community, its tenuousness and strength, in Greenwich Village, one of Manhattan’s last true neighborhoods. Her essays and articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Global City Review, International Herald Tribune, Newsday, New York Times, New York Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Psychology Today, San Francisco Chronicle, Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine, The City Sun, The Urban Audubon, Who Knew? Catskill Literary Journal, The Village Voice, The Villager, and The Writer. Her poems for children have appeared in Ladybug Magazine. She is currently writing her memoir, Our Fractured, Perfect Selves: Reflections of Family. Sharpe is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.
Leslie T. Sharpe received a B.A. from Wheaton College (MA), in Ancient Greek Language and Literature, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude, and she also received a Master’s degree in Ancient Greek Language and Literature from Columbia University in New York City, where she was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. Sharpe also studied Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, where she was truly amazed, walking on the Acropolis in the footsteps of Socrates, and then contemplating the smoky residue of Bronze Age watch fires enshrined on the stone walls of King Agamemnon’s Palace at Mycenae.

 

Carrie Bradley Neves is an Upstate New York native who grew up outside Albany and returned to the area a little over a decade ago. She has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Williams College, where she also studied playwriting and poetry; and a master’s degree in fiction writing from the University of New Hampshire, where she studied fiction writing and poetry. For the last twenty-five years, Carrie has focused many of her writing goals on writing lyrics, making records, performing, and touring as a singer-songwriter and violinist. Her work-for-pay life is as a copy editor, specializing in cookbooks.

 

Brett Barry graduated from Syracuse University’s television, radio and film program, and worked as an associate documentary producer for several years before launching a career in voice-overs in 2002. Brett is represented in NYC by Accent Talent and can be heard on hundreds of audiobooks, television promos, and as the host of public radio’s Sound Beat. Brett also runs Silver Hollow Audio, an independent audio production studio in New York’s Catskill Mountains. He teaches in the Digital Media & Journalism Department at SUNY New Paltz.

 

Andrew Flach, a lifelong fitness enthusiast, is a graduate of St. David’s School, The Browning School, and Vassar College. As the President and CEO of The Hatherleigh Company, Andrew’s role is directing the research and product development efforts of the Five Star Fitness team.

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SPARK: Lilly Golden, and Lorrayne Bolger
Lilly Golden has been a book editor in the New York City publishing industry for three decades. She and her family moved to the Catskills full time twenty years ago. As an editor-at-large, she has brought hundreds of literary works from manuscript to finished book, and is currently acquiring, editing, and publishing ten books a year for Arcade Publishing. She is the founder and mentor for Roxbury Central School's SPARK: Art and Literary Magazine, treasurer of the Halcottsville Fire Department, and District Commissioner for Brumbies Pony Club. A life-long reader and writer who believes it's never too late to develop a new creative passion, she writes screenplays in her spare time. 

 

Lorrayne Bolger is on the faculty at Roxbury Central School, where she teaches fifth and sixth grade English and collaborates on the school’s literary and arts magazine, the Roxbury Spark. Additionally, she has served on the Roxbury Library Association’s Board of Trustees for over 20 years in various capacities. Through her involvement with WIM, she hopes to engage young writers beyond the classroom walls and open pathways to more literary opportunities for them.

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NEW RELEASE: Anique Sara Taylor
Anique Sara Taylor earned an MFA in Poetry (Drew University), an MFA in Drawing & BFA in Painting (Pratt Institute - With Highest Honors), a Diplome in Literature (The Sorbonne). She studied Literature at Antioch College. Active in St. Mark’s Poetry Project, NYC, she studied with Alice Notley and Bernadette Mayer and frequently gave featured readings throughout New York City. Her chapbook Under the Ice Moon was chosen finalist by Blue Light Press’ Poetry Chapbook Contest, 2015. Her chapbook, an early version of Where Space Bends was chosen finalist by both Minerva Rising and Blue Light Press’ 2014 Poetry Chapbook Contests. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Common Ground Review, Stillwater Review, Adanna, Earth’s Daughters, The World (St. Mark’s Poetry Project) among others, including several anthologies. She’s written for HBO, Simon & Schuster and Playwright’s Horizons. She taught Creative Writing for Benedictine Hospital’s Oncology Support Program and the Phoenicia Poetry Workshop. She currently teaches Creative NonFiction for Writers in the Mountains and Poetry Writing for Bard LLI. Her chapbook Poems was published by Unimproved Editions Inc. Her full-length poetry book Where Space Bends is forthcoming with Finishing Line Press.