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 October 21st, we welcome back Linda Griggs and Martin Willits Jr. as they make their annual trip to New England.
Linda Griggs has worked as an elementary school art teacher and a mental health counselor. She has also worked with at-risk youth. A college teacher currently working at SUNY Empire State College, she holds a M.P.S. in the Applied Work of the Humanistic Psychologists. She is also an artist, and she is the founder and host of The Palace Poetry Group in Syracuse, NY. Her children’s book, The Night of the Starfish People, was published in 2011 (Willet Press), and she self-published the chapbook, Love Poems of the Universe, in 2003. She lives in Syracuse, NY.
Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He currently evaluates Prior Learning Evaluations for SUNY Empire State College. He is a visual artist of Victorian and Chinese paper cutouts. He was nominated for 6 Pushcart and 6 Best of the Net awards. He provided his hands-on workshop “How to Make Origami Haiku Jumping Frogs” at the 2012 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. He won the William K. Hathaway Award for Poem of the Year 2012. He has 5 full-length and 20 chapbooks of poetry including forthcoming poetry books include Waiting For The Day To Open Its Wings (UNBOUND Content), “Art Is the Impression of an Artist” (Edgar and Lenore's Publishing House), City Of Tents (Crisis Chronicles Press), Swimming In the Ladle of Stars (Kattywompus Press), and he is the winner of the inaugural Wild Earth Poetry Contest for his full length collection Searching For What Is Not There (Hiraeth Press).
