May 13th: Stone Soup Presents The Light Brigade

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 May 13th, co-host Michael F. Gill presents the return of the performance grou pthe Light Brigade, featuring Barb Crane, A.M. Juster, Joan Kimball, and Amy Woods.

Barbara Lydecker Crane, who founded the Light Brigade in 2007, enjoys writing both serious and comic work. Her poems have been included in Light Quarterly, Measure, and 14 by 14, and many others. In 2011 she won the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Award. In 2012 White Violet Press published her first book, Zero Gravitas, and this year Daffydowndilly Books will publish her children’s collection, Alphabetricks.

Mike Juster, poetically known as A.M. Juster, is the author of four books of translation and poetry; his translation of Tibullus’ Elegies was published last year by Oxford University Press. He is a winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the only three-time winner of the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award sponsored by The Formalist. He has published in The Paris Review, The New Criterion, Southwest Review and many other journals, and he has been a featured poet in Light and The Barefoot Muse.

Joan Alice Wood Kimball joined a poetry workshop group in Wayland in 2002 and started sending pieces out. Since then she's published over forty poems in journals and has put them in a blog on the internet. Six of her poems have been finalists in contests. She has one book, This River Hill, published in 2009, and two manuscripts in the works. She belongs to three poetry study groups, and continues to try new techniques.

In retirement Amy Woods devotes her considerable energy to writing poetry. Her subject matter is human foibles, which include her own. In 2011 she published her “epic” poem, “The Discovery of Mummy,” a fictitious account of the upheaval caused in “The American Museum of Natural History” by the mysterious appearance of an Egyptian mummy partially unwrapped, then haphazardly stuffed into a Zabar’s bag which the Assistant Director trips over upon entering the Museum’s incinerator closet. It was performed as a play in Cambridge.