Stone Soup Poetry meets from 8-10 p.m. every Monday at the Out of The Blue Art Gallery at 106 Prospect Street with an open mike sign-up at 7:30 p.m. On July 12th, Joanie DiMartino will debut her first poetry book Strange Girls, for the Boston area.
Joanie DiMartino has work published in literary journals including Alimentum, Calyx, Wicked Alice Poetry Journal, and Modern Haiku, and also in anthologies, such as Motif: Writing by Ear, Letters to the World: Poems from the Wom-Po Listserv, and New Growth: Recent Kentucky Writings. She is a past winner of the Betty Gabehart Award for poetry from the Women Writers Conference, Kentucky, and was a finalist in the Cultural Center of Cape Cod poetry competition. She is a founding member of the women’s poetry group Mosaic, in Lexington, Kentucky, and is currently also a member of Poets & Writers Consortium East in Groton, Connecticut. Her first chapbook, Licking the Spoon, was published in 2007 by Finishing Line Press, and her first full-length collection, Strange Girls, about women in sideshows, circuses, and carnivals, was released in June, 2010 from Little Red Tree Publishing.
Her poems have been featured in several art exhibits in Lexington, Kentucky, including Sideshow, a collaborative project with the Women Artists Group; Collaborations + Catalysts, an exhibit highlighting combined mediums; and Connections, an interfaith exhibit, where her poem, “The Monks,” an experimental piece incorporating Gregorian Chant throughout the poem, was performed. She was most recently featured in the exhibit Women in the Arts, a show by local artist Deborah Curtis, where her portrait and poem, “Self-Portrait,” were on display at ArtWorks in Norwich, Connecticut.
DiMartino holds an MA in public history from Rutgers University. She has worked in the history museum field for fifteen years, and her poetry often pairs history with a feminist perspective. She hosts ‘Soup & Sonnets,’ a monthly literary salon for women, and, along with performing poetry, leads workshops and discussion groups. Raised in southern New Jersey, DiMartino has lived in Lexington, Kentucky, and now resides with her son, Dante, in Mystic, Connecticut.
Click here to Purchase Strange Girls.
