HVWC’s Published Student Reading with Bonni Brodnick, Jeanne Dickey, Wendy K. Mages, Kathryn Weld, Patricia Hemminger & Tony Howarth (via Zoom)

Please join Susan Hodara, Jonathan Vatner, & Jennifer Franklin  as they welcome six of their students—recently published poets and prose writers. The program will include Susan Hodara introducing Bonni Brodnick, Jonathan Vatner introducing Wendy Mages and Jeanne Dickey, and Jennifer Franklin introducing Kathryn Weld, Patricia Hemminger, Tony Howarth, & Harriet Shenkman.

NB: This reading will take place on Zoom. The link will be sent to the email that you use to register as soon as you reserve a spot. (Please check your spam folder and save the link to your calendar.) It will also be sent to you the day of the reading for your convenience.

Our readings are free and open to the public. Please consider buying the writers’ books to support their work and the literary arts.

Bonni Brodnick is the author of the memoir, My Stroke in the Fast Lane: A Journey to Recovery (August Willis Books & Co., 2023) and Pound Ridge Past, now in its second edition. Formerly with Conde Nast Publications’ Glamour and House & Garden magazines, Bonni has written scripts for Children’s Television Workshop, was a weekly newspaper columnist, and was editor of two academic magazines. She is an award-winning communications specialist, a member of Pound Ridge Authors Society, and has a blog (bonnibrodnick.com). In addition, Bonni is an ambassador for the American Heart Association and a proud stroke survivor.

Jeanne Dickey’s work has appeared in Passages North, Identity Theory Magazine, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and the Hungarian magazine Irodalmi Jeleni. She is hard at work on her first novel and studies at HVWC with Jonathan Vatner.

The experience of growing up in rural North Yorkshire, UK, along with her science background and love of nature informs and inspires Patricia Hemminger’s poetry. Her poems have been published in various journals including Spillway, Streetlight Magazine, The Write Launch, First Literary Review East and Peregrine Journal as well as in her chapbook, What Do We Know of Time. She is a graduate of NYU’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program and of Drew University’s MFA Poetry and Poetry in Translation Program. She is enrolled in Jennifer Franklin’s YoYB manuscript revision class.

Tony Howarth, editor for dramatic writing for The Westchester Review, is a playwright, director, former journalist, retired in 1991 after twenty-eight years as a high school and college teacher of English and theatre. William Wordsworth helped him survive adolescence, inspired him to write poetry of his own, but as as a college freshman he found a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused did not fit well in a climate devoted to the work of Eliot and Pope. He adjusted his ambitions to journalism, in Cleveland; Meriden, Connecticut; the US Army; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Indianapolis; and New York City, where he was editor of the editorial page of The World-Telegram and Sun. Disillusioned after a printers’ strike and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, he turned to teaching, where he was asked to develop a theatre program, which in turn led to a list of professional credits, including a dozen plays and a musical presented off-Broadway; full lengths include Thornwood, which won a Drama League grant, produced at Circle Rep and the Mint Theatre in New York City, colleges across the U.S., Amsterdam, Tanzania, made into an award-winning indie film, Slings and Arrows. For many summers he directed musicals at the College Light Opera Company in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He began writing poetry again in 2009 after a visit to Wordworth’s Dove Cottage (clouds and daffodils) in England’s Lake District. His poetry, developed at the Hudson Valley Writing Center under the treasured guidance of Jennifer Franklin and Fred Marchant, has appeared in many magazines, among them Chronogram, The Naugatuck River Review, Obsessed with Pipework, The Connecticut River Review, Raven’s Perch, The Sow’s Ear, the Grayson Press anthology Forgotten Women. And a play published by The Westchester Review called The Wedding Ring, a moment in the life of William Wordsworth. His verse dramas Wild Man of the Mountain and A Hand to Hold were published by Broadstone Books.

Wendy K. Mages, a Mercy University Professor, is a Pushcart Prize nominee and an award-winning poet and author. She earned her doctorate in Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and her master’s in Theatre at Northwestern University. As a complement to her research on the effect of the arts on learning and development, she performs at storytelling events and festivals in the US and abroad. She studies at HVWC with Joanthan Vatner. To learn more about her and her work, and to find links to her published stories and poetry, please visit https://www.mercy.edu/directory/wendy-mages

Kathryn Weld is a writer and mathematician living in Pleasantville New York. She holds a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Graduate Center CUNY and is Professor of Mathematics at Manhattan College. In 2013, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Sewanee School of Letters. Her poetry has been published in print and online in journals such as The Cortland Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Southwest Review, Gyroscope Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and in her chapbook, Waking Light (Kattywompus Press). Her debut full-length collection of poetry, Afterimage, was published by Pine Row Press in fall 2023. She is a long-time student in Jennifer Franklin’s YoYB manuscript revision class.