Word Thursdays – Featured Readers: Antoinette Brim-Bell and Annis Cassells

Description

Word Thursdays Online featuring Annis Cassells & Antoinette Brim-Bell will broadcast live on Thursday, February 27 at 7 PM EST. To attend the event, please click this link just before 7 PM EST: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81577446746 Or visit Bright Hill’s Facebook page at 7 PM EST to view the live stream. RSVP to the event on Facebook here.
Suggested donation is $3, and free to students.
Donations to Bright Hill are gratefully accepted via Paypal by visiting this link, https://paypal.me/brighthillpress, by check made out to Bright Hill Press Inc, and mailed to 94 Church Street, Treadwell, NY 13846, or by credit card by personal appointment by emailing info@brighthillpress.org.
Virtual “donation jar:” https://paypal.me/brighthillpress

Antoinette Brim-Bell (Antoinette Brim), Connecticut’s 8th State Poet Laureate, is the author of three full-length poetry collections: These Women You Gave Me, Icarus in Love, and Psalm of the Sunflower. Her poetry has appeared in various journals, magazines, textbooks, and anthologies, as well as in Poetry Magazine and Poem-a-Day. Brim-Bell has also published critical works, “The Myopic Eye in Alice Walker’s ‘Flowers’” (Critical Insights: Alice Walker, Salem Press) and “Juxtaposed Dichotomies: the idealized white suburban pastoral, the surrealist tableau of Black Poverty & the Women in between” (The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent, Haymarket Books). Brim-Bell has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for both poetry and essay. She is a Cave Canem Foundation Fellow and an alum of Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA).

Brim-Bell hosted a series of Black History Month television programs for the OneWorld Progressive Institute. She is also a former guest host of Patrick Oliver’s Literary Nation Talk Radio (KABF 88.3, Little Rock), for which she interviewed a variety of entertainers, literary figures, political pundits, and community developers.

Additionally, In Her Image, a ballet based on Brim-Bell’s These Women You Gave Me, choreographed by Sarah Grace and commissioned by the New England Ballet Theatre, was performed in Connecticut and on the renowned Alvin Ailey stage in New York City.

Annis Cassells is a writer, coach, and teacher who lives half-time in California and Oregon. She claimed her poet’s voice in 2015, and her work has been published in print and online journals.

In 2019 Annis published her first poetry collection, You Can’t Have It All: Poems. She is a contributor in the social justice anthology, Enough, Say Their Names: Messages from Ground Zero to the WORLD, which features photography and artwork from the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests.

Just in time for Annis’s 80th birthday in 2023, her latest collection, What the Country Wrought, was launched. The collection features poems of rural roots and legacies, the mainstays of home, family, and personal identity. She includes poems that address societal issues and truths America has wrought and poems that revel in the ideals and spirit of building a country.

Passionate about the legacy of family stories, Annis facilitates memoir writing classes and workshops for senior adults and continues to write her own memoir tales and “poemoirs”.

For over 25 years, Annis traversed the country on her candy apple red motorcycle. She is grateful for the personal growth, new experiences and vistas, life-long friends, and poetry subject matter.