An evening of writers reading and talking about writing.  There will be a prompt for everyone.

A wine and cheese reception precedes the program at 6pm; a Q&A follows the reading.

Linda Hillman Chayes is the author of two chapbooks, Not My First Walk on the Moon and The Lapse, (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in Kestrel, American Poetry Journal, Bracken, Quartet, Westchester Review, 2 Horatio, and other publications. She practices as a psychologist/psychoanalyst in New York City. As a psychoanalyst, she co-wrote and co-edited a book The Voice of the Analyst: Narratives in Developing a Psychoanalytic Identity published by Routledge Press in 2018.

Renee Christine Ehle is a writer and educator living in the Bronx, New York, with family ties stretching from Pennsylvania to California.  Her fiction and poetry have been published in a variety of small presses, and her poetry was long-listed for the 2018 Nâzim Hikmet Poetry Festival Competition. Say That We Are Here is her first chapbook.

Bonnie Jill Emanuel is the author of Glitter City (Cornerstone, 2024). Her poems and interviews most recently appear in The American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Pine Hills Review, and more.  Emanuel earned an MFA from The City College of New York where she received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing and the Stark Poetry Prize. She was named a finalist in the Frontier Poetry 2024 Ekphrastic Contest and for the RHINO 2025 Founders Prize for poems from her newest body of work. Born in Detroit, she lives in New York.  

Lynn McGee is the author of the just-released poetry collection Science Says Yes, which looks at a planet reeling with unnatural disasters and the cackle of technology, a panoramic view offset by the pursuit of happiness and gratitude. Earlier collections include Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019), Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), and two award-winning poetry chapbooks: Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press).

Elaine Sexton’s most recent collection of poetry is Site Specific: New & Selected Poems just out with Grid Books. Sexton is a teacher, critic, micro-publisher, and maker. She is also the author of The Post Office, a chamber opera in poems in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky, recently workshopped and performed by Opera Fusion/Cincinnati Opera (March 2025). She teaches text and image at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute.

Vanessa Hedwig Smith is the author of Room Tone, is a painter, filmmaker, and writer who has lived and worked in India, Nepal, England, and the US. Smith is most proud of a BBC Correspondent piece she produced, which was instrumental in helping free a 14-year-old girl from prison, which helped change Nepalese law, and which won the Amnesty International Media 2000 Award. Smith is a co-founder of the mental health series– Let’s Talk. Her work has been published in The Search for Reality, Poetry Apocalypse, Tiny Seeds Literary Journal, Chronogram, Topical Poetry, On the Seawall, and Silent Auctions Magazine.