Tuesday, October 26, 7pm – Poetry
Moonstone Poetry Series Presents
Gary Glazer & Lisa Grunberger
Gary Glazner is the founder and Executive Director of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, (APP). The National Endowment for the Arts listed the APP as a “best practice” for their Arts and Aging initiative. NBC’s “Today” show, NPR’s “All Things Considered” and Voice of America have featured segments on Glazner’s work. Harper Collins, W.W. Norton and Salon.com have published his work. Glazner is the author and editor of five books including: “Ears on Fire: Snapshot Essays in a World of Poets,” published on La Alameda Press, the book chronicles a year abroad in Asia and Europe meeting poets, working on translations and writing poems; “How to Make a Living as a Poet” on Soft Skull Press, which features essays and interviews on creative ways to bring poetry to the world and “Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry,” on Manic D Press. In 2009, Glazner was invited by a group of poets to launch the APP in Berlin and Marburg. In 2010, the U.S. Embassy is funding a pilot project for the APP in Germany. From 2007 to 2010, Glazner was the Managing Director of the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City. In 1990, Glazner working with Poetry Slam founder Marc Smith produced the first U.S. National Poetry Slam in San Francisco.
Lisa Grunberger was raised in Long Island, NY, by an Israeli mother and a Viennese Father. She holds a doctorate in Comparative Religions and American Cultural History from the University of Chicago Divinity School. As a Yoga teacher, a college professor and published writer, she is an entertaining and passionate public speaker. Grunberger’s poems – narrative, lyrical, and highly experimental — have been published in a variety of print and online journals. They have appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Mudfish, Nimrod, The Drunken Boat, Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal, Parole des Jours, Mizmor L’ David Anthology: Shoah, and Philadelphia Poets. She has poems in translation forthcoming in a Dialogi, one of Slovenia’s major cultural and literary journals. Her one-woman show, The Prayer Collector, which she performed at the Makor Steinhardt Center/92st Y in NYC tells the story of an old Jewish woman who collects the prayers from the Wailing Wall; it was accompanied by klezmer music, Sabbath candles and Yiddish stories. In her latest project, Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position Grunberger braids the yoga tradition with her Yiddish culture (like a challah bread!). This charming, deceptively simple tale of love and loss, bridges the old Yiddish world with new world Yiddish. Yiddish Yoga is an example of how her work crosses genres and generations. She has performed Yiddish Yoga at Jewish Community Centers throughout the United States – Miami, St. Louis, Houston, and New Jersey. She is an Assistant Professor in English at Temple University.