TUESDAY, JUNE 8, 7pm – Poetry
The Moonstone Poetry Series Presents
ARLENE BERNSTEIN, MIHAELA MOSCALIUC, and KATHLEEN SHEEDER BONANNO
Arlene Bernstein, spent thirty-two years as an English teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia. After retiring in 2000, she founded Friends of Poetry, performing her poetry throughout the Philadelphia/Main Line/Media area as well as organizing and promoting local poets and musicians. She has presented and hosted dozens of events in libraries, book stores, and other venues. Her poetry has appeared various journals including Freshest, Ink, Tracks, Nature in Legends and Literature, Mad Poets Review, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Fox Chase Review, as well as being broadcast. Arlene has been nominated for Pushcart prizes for her article, “Richard Pierce: Lost Child”; and, for her poem, “Recurrent Nightmare.” Her poetry has won First Prize in the Ardmore Public Library’s Charlotte Miller Simon Poetry Contest, First Prize in the City Suburban News 2007 Poetry Contest, and Prizes in the Mad Poets Society Annual Contest.
Mihaela Moscaliuc’s poetry collection, Father Dirt (winner of the Kinereth Gensler Award) was published by Alice James Books in 2010. Her poems, reviews, translations, and articles appear in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Poetry International, Arts & Letters, Pleiades, and Soundings. She teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation at Drew University and at Monmouth University.
Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno is author of Slamming Open the Door, a collection of poems recounting the true story of the murder of her daughter, Leidy Bonanno, in 2003. She received the Beatrice Hawley Award for this work, which is in it’s third printing from Alice James Books. Slamming Open the Door generated an interview with Terry Gross, a review in the New York Times, and two poems from it were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kathleen’s poetry has also been published in Women’s Review of Books, Margie and the anthology: Beloved on the Earth. Kathleen received the Purple Ribbon Award from the Lutheran Settlement Home for her advocacy on behalf of domestic violence issues. She is a contributing editor of The American Poetry Review and teaches English and creative writing at Cheltenham High School.