Alice Kociemba and Rich Youman will read from their poems celebrating all kinds of love in a program titled “Poetry from the Heart” at the Woods Hole Public Library on Saturday, February 15 at 3 PM. Following the couple’s presentation, others will be invited to read their own love poems or from other published poets. People who would like to join in solely as audience members are also welcome. The event is free and open to the public.
Alice and Rich are both poets, published and awarded:
Rich’s narrative poetry has appeared in the Cape Cod Times, Cape Cod Poetry Review, and the Paterson Literary Review, among other publications, and his haiku, haibun, and related essays have been published internationally. Currently editor-in-chief of Contemporary Haibun Online, he has published a collection of linked haibun with Margaret Chula, Shadow Lines, which won a Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America, as well as two individual haibun collections, All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2015) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). Bob Lucky, in a review of Head-On, wrote, “There’s not one haibun in this chapbook that couldn’t be used to teach a master class.”
Alice is the author of Bourne Bridge (Turning Point, 2016) and the chapbook, Death of Teaticket Hardware, the title poem of which won an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Alice was Guest Editor of Common Threads, the poetry discussion project of Mass Poetry (2015 & 2016) and for the past ten years has led a poetry discussion group at the Falmouth Public Library. She is the founding director of Calliope: Poetry for Community and hosts “Poetic License,” a monthly open mic at FCTV.
The couple met through Calliope, were attracted to each other and their poems, and say that “the rest is history.” They now live in North Falmouth and are currently, along with Robin Smith-Johnson, editing an anthology titled From the Farther Shore: Discovering Cape Cod and the Islands Through Poetry; it will be published later this year by Bass River Press, an imprint of the Cultural Center of Cape Cod.