Tap the Cypher with Cape Cod Poets

Alice and Barry will give a presentation titled “From First Draft To Feature”, based on their experience as poetry venue hosts and is designed to support poets’ writing and revising poems and performing their work to an audience.

Alice Kociemba

Using humor and memory to celebrate people and place, Alice Kociemba is the author of a new chapbook Death of Teaticket Hardware (2011), the title poem of which won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review.  She is a member of Jamaica Pond Poets, a weekly collaborative workshop and directs of Calliope Poetry Readings at West Falmouth Library, a monthly poetry series. Alice credits Emily Dickinson with saving her sanity after she suffered a severe head injury in 1986 and couldnt read, drive or work for six months.  Shortly thereafter, Alice wrote her first poem, seizure, about her experience.  As well as working on her first volume of poetry, Seizure and Other Disorders, her recent poems have or will appear in Atlanta Review, Main Street Rag,  Off the Coast, Plainsongs, Slant, Roanoke Review and Salamander.

Barry Hellman

Barry Hellman is a clinical psychologist and poet. His poems have won several prizes and have appeared in Writers’ Journal, Five Hundred Tuesdays: The Wellfleet Writers’ Guild Anthology, The Aurorean, Cape Cod’s Literary Voice, World of Water, World of Sand: A Cape Cod Collection of Poetry, Fiction & Memoir, Poetica, PrimeTime Cape Cod, Ballard Street Poetry Journal, Still Crazy Literary Magazine, broadsides, and in art-poetry exhibits. He’s the author of The King of Newark, a collection of 26 poems, published in January, 2012 by Finishing Line Press. Barry led the Writer’s Group at the Eastham library, hosted the Chapel In The Pines Poetry Series, and currently co-hosts the Poets’ Corner Open Mic at The Cultural Center Of Cape Cod.  He conducts workshops on writing poems about family, friends, lovers, and others, and on the relationship between poetry and psychotherapy. He publishes a website at http://home.comcast.net/~bmhellman   which provides information about poetry events on Cape Cod and other material of interest to poets. He’s been the featured poet at various venues, and is a member of several writing groups on the outer Cape.

As always the meal will be buffet style and the fun begins at 5:30. The cost will be $20.

Please contact me at ksymmons@comcast.net or call Moira at our office (508-420-0200 or writers@capecodwriterscenter.org) to let us know if you are planning to attend. Please do your best to reserve in advance. We’ll never turn you away but it makes for an easier time for the restaurant staff.

See you on the 21st!

Kevin Symmons, President