September 30: Stone Soup Poetry Online All-Open Mic

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On September 30, we end the month with an all-open mic before a feature-filled October.

 

Join us on Wednesday, September 30, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 824 0101 7078

Password: stonesoup 

 

October 14: Timothy Gager Features at Stone Soup Poetry

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On October 14, another Stone Soup friend stops by as Timothy Gager returns to promote his latest publication. 

Timothy Gager is the author of 20 books of fiction and poetry, which includes his fourth novel, Shadows of the Seen, and his most recent collection of poetry, Almost Bluing for X-Tra Whiteness. He plays music as a solo singer-songwriter and co-hosts the popular podcats, Dean & Deans: Dating, Dread and Disasters.

Join us on Wednesday, October 14, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 837 8721 9966

Password: stonesoup

October 7: Mignon Ariel King Features at Stone Soup Poetry

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On October 7, Stone Soup friend Mignon Ariel King returns to read from her latest collection.

Mignon Ariel King is a third-generation New England woman who holds a Master’s in English from Simmons University. She is the publisher of Tell-Tale Chapbooks and Hidden Charm Press. King has been a featured poet in Greater Boston venues 25 times and has been published in various journals since 2007. Her latest chapbook is Under the Arbored Moon.

Join us on Wednesday, October 7, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 819 7095 3818

Password: stonesoup

September 23: Lee Desrosiers Features at Stone Soup Poetry

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On September 23, features return just as fall is starting with Lee Desrosiers reading from her new collection.

Lee Desrosiers (they/she) graduated in 2008 from the New England College MFA program in Poetry. Their fourth and latest full-length book of poems is Pocketing the Light (Kelsay Books 2026). Other books include: The Philosopher’s Daughter (2013), Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak (2016), and Keeping Planes in the Air (2020). Two chapbooks, Inner Sky and Typing with e.e. cummings, are from Glass Lyre Press. They edit and publish an international journal of narrative poetry, Naugatuck River Review and Wordpeace.co, a multi-genre online literary journal dedicated to peace and social justice. Lee lives, teaches and writes in Westfield, Massachusetts.

Octavio Quintanilla writes: “In Pocketing the Light, Lee Desrosiers’s poems ask what it means to inhabit a life that is always changing, a life that keeps asking us to name the things we lose in time: a mother’s voice, a father’s laughter, “grass / bowing” to its wildness.” These poems move through meditations on illness and aging and move through beautiful observations of nature: “Nature is a balm to me even though / I don’t know the names of all the flowers,” Desrosiers writes, and this quiet confession becomes the emotional center of a book attentive to a living world we are part of and that holds us until we are ready to let go.”

Join us on Wednesday, September 23, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 883 3941 5240

Password: stonesoup

September 16: Stone Soup Poetry Online All-Open Mic

 

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On June 17, we continue the month of June with an all-open mic.

 

Join us on Wednesday, September 16, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 837 0804 4470

Password: stonesoup 

September 9: Stone Soup Poetry Online All-Open Mic

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On September 9, we continue the month of September with an all-open mic.

 

Join us on Wednesday, September 9, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 825 1058 4516

Password: stonesoup 

Out for August

 

 

Due to a series of events, Stone Soup will be on hiatus until September. 

 

July 29: Diana Saenz Features at Stone Soup Poetry

Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On July 29, we conclude the month of July with former Boston poet Diana Saenz.

Diana Saenz has been writing since 1964, at the age of 16, when she attained her first typewriter by saving Green Stamps. This instinct for the advantage of technology has never waned. Neither has her commitment to the written word. Her life in the arts, surrounded by actors, playwrights, poets, dancers, artists, and writers, is the gift that writing gave her, and for this she is ever humble and grateful.

Diana is a native of Los Angeles, where she encountered her first writers at East L.A. College, and was part of the community in the early 70s, mixing with activists of every sort, from the Chicano Renaissance of graphic artists and writers, in magazines like Con Safos, to the Brown Berets to the Revolutionary Communist Party. After she was evicted from the RCP, she made her way to San Francisco, joining the vibrant poetry scene, which included forces of nature like Jack Hershman, Joie Cook, and Bob Kaufman, and where she morphed into performance poetry. From there, she traveled overseas and lived in London, mixing with the thriving community of poets. Upon her return to San Francisco, performance poetry led to playwriting and a decade in the Theatre community, particularly the Latino Theatre Artists Association, which included Cherie Moraga, Josefina López, and Octavio Solis. She and others established Sangre, a multicultural theatre company, and produced a number of plays.

Feeling burnout, Diana moved to France before returning to this hemisphere, where she settled in Montreal, Canada for six months before her visa expired, then moved to the East Coast after a year in Alabama, where she wrote The Book of Eve. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, she found that there was no calendar for poets like Poetry Flash in San Francisco, and established the Boston Poet Calendar and Magazine, which was later run by Debbie Burn. Later, she established BostonPoet.com and created an interactive calendar that anyone could populate with their poetry announcements. She met her husband, Marshall Harvey, at TT The Bears, a popular Stone Soup Thursday night Poetry Venue in the 1990s run by Jack Powers. Together, she and Marshall published the works of other poets, including Bad Ass and Virgin Voyage, which featured C.C. Colins, Meg Smith, Afaa Weaver, Walter Howard, and Raffy Woof. 

After twenty years on the East Coast, one Spring—not up for another nor’easter—Diana returned to her native California in 2013, where she wrote her first novel. She eventually settled in Murrieta, CA, 60 miles south of Los Angeles. There she tried comedy for a year, but could not get past the misogynistic and politically reactionary side of it, or the late, late, very late nights. But she did learn to overcome her fear of performing off-book.

Today, Diana continues to write political articles on Substack, books, and the occasional poem. She is active in the Temecula Valley Atheists Meetup group, teaches yoga (having received her certification earlier this year), and is currently working on a yoga manual for seniors to be published in September.

Join us on Wednesday, July 29, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.

The meeting ID is 870 1187 2142

Password: stonesoup