Michael Cleary was born in 1945 and grew up in Glens Falls, NY, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, a city profiled by Look Magazine’s 1944 six-part series, “Hometown, USA” which depicted the “typical” hometown GIs would return to as WW II came to a close. First in his family to attend college, he taught high school English before earning a doctorate in English in Tennessee and joining the English faculty at Broward Community College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, an open door college where he has taught students from remedial to honors level while specializing in creative writing and film. For his classroom excellence, he has been awarded an endowed teaching chair.

Cleary is a two-time recipient of a $5,000 Florida Arts Grant in Poetry (1986 and 1999) and a featured lecturer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. As current winner of the Paumanok Poetry Award, in November he will be visiting writer at Farmingdale State University of New York, adding his who-the-hell-is he? name to a list that includes Galway Kinnell, Carolyn Forche, and W. S. Merwin. His collection of poems, Hometown, USA, was published as 1992 winner of The American Book Series Award by San Diego Poets Press. One critic observed how the book “looks back on …family and country with a gentle but passionate eye: gentle because these people and places are recreated lovingly; passionate because they are shown truthfully, and in depth.” Another noted, “In Cleary’s work, blood, lust, and loss blend with humor, passion, and innocence. They’re elegant and brawny at the same time.” Halfway Decent Sinners, his second collection, appeared in Spring 2006 from Word Tech Communications.

Peter Meinke has published 15 books of poems, 7 in the prestigious Pitt Poetry Series, the most recent being The Contracted World (2006), Zinc Fingers (2001), Scars (1996), and Liquid Paper (1996). His poetry has received many awards, including 2 NEA Fellowships and 3 prizes from the Poetry Society of America. A bilingual edition of his poems, Maples & Orange Trees, was published in St. Petersburg, Russia. His book of short stories, The Piano Tuner, won the 1986 Flannery O’Connor Award; another collection, Unheard Music, will be published this fall, along with his book on reading and writing poems, The Shape of Poetry. He directed The Writing Workshop at Eckerd College for many years, and has often been writer-in-residence at other colleges and universities, including Davidson College, the University of Hawaii, George Washington University, and Emory; from 2003 through 2005 he held the Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and dozens of other magazines. He and his wife, the artist Jeanne Clark, have lived in St. Petersburg since 1966. In the spring of 2008 he’ll be “Distinguished Poet-in-Residence” at Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas.

All readings include a question & answer period and a reception with books by the author(s) for sale.

Suggested Donation: $5 ($3 for HVWC members and those under age 18)

Programs and events at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center are made possible, in part, by grants from the Bydale Foundation, the David G. Taft Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, and the Thendara Foundation; with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts; and by the Basic Program Support Grant of the Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government.

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