Local Journals, Local Writers

Our third annual reading focused on two local journals, Inkwell and The Westchester Review, spotlights writers featured in their latest editions. This is a great opportunity to hear local writers and to ask questions of the editors of these two publications concerning submission guidelines and more.

Inkwell, Manhattanville College’s award-winning literary journal, is published semiannually in the spring and fall by the College’s Master of Arts in Writing Program. Staffed by faculty and graduate writing students and alumni, Inkwell is dedicated to presenting emerging and established writers, and to publishing high quality poems and short stories. The journal also features nonfiction, artwork, and essays and interviews on writing by established literary figures. Inkwell’s fiction and poetry competitions, now in their 12th and 13th years respectively, offer cash prizes and publication. www.inkwelljournal.org

• Fiction writer Arlaina Tibensky is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program. Her fiction has appeared in One Story, Small Spiral Notebook, and The Madison Review, among others. She is the Artistic Director of Pen Parentis, a New York based collective for writers with children, and is hard at work on her second novel for young adults.
• Poet Ellen Peckham has read, published and exhibited in the U.S., Europe and Latin America. She frequently uses both art forms in a single work, the text decorating and explicating and the image illuminating. Her archives of drafts, edits and art are collected at the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities and a 7 minute visual biography, Parallel Vocabularies, is available on DVD and via her WEB site, www.ellenpeckham.com.
• Fiction writer Dan Preniszni is the Director of Marketing & Publications at Manhattanville College and a student in Manhattanville's Master of Arts in Writing Program. Dan has been published in The Boston Phoenix; The Village Voice; and one of his stories was made into an episode of CBS TV's Cagney & Lacey. He is the recipient of the 2009 Elizabeth McCormack/Inkwell MAW Students & Alumni Award for Fiction.

The Westchester Review is published annually. The editors welcome previously unpublished poems, stories and essays by established and emerging writers living or working in New York’s Westchester County. According to publisher JoAnn Duncan Terdiman, The Westchester Review began with a conversation on a summer evening. “There are so many gifted writers here in the county,” I said to my daughter. “Wouldn’t it be something if there were a journal for the many voices of Westchester?” We looked at each other and said, “Why not?” www.westchesterreview.com

• Poet Jessica Bennett lives in Katonah with her patient husband, their two teenagers, and a fat coonhound.
• Nina Gabriele-Cuva is a teaching artist and actor/director. Throughout Westchester she teaches theater and creative writing and has developed programs for special-needs youth and first-time teenage female offenders. Nina is now writing and directing, with Pelham High School students, a play that addresses the issues of elementary school children in Westchester.
• Rachel M. Simon's book of poems, Theory of Orange, won the Transcontinental Prize from Pavement Saw Press. Her chapbook, Marginal Road, is forthcoming from Hollyridge Press. She teaches gender studies, film, and writing at SUNY Purchase, Sarah Lawrence College, and the Marymount Manhattan College program at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
• Rachel Wineberg is a writer and theater director who lives in Hastings-on-Hudson.

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, the William Robinson 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 Arts Westchester with funds from Westchester County Government.

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