Poetry reading starts Saturday at Baby Grand Books

Warwick - Baby Grand Books at 7 West St. in Warwick will host a poetry reading series on the first and third Saturdays of October and November and the first Saturday of December. Readings will be at 4 P.M. and will include a short musical interlude by Joy Kissane. Refreshments will be provided. Donna Spector and Mary Makofske begin the series this Saturday, Oct. 7. Spector is a playwright as well as a poet. Her play, “Golden Ladder” (published in Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002) was produced Off-Broadway, as was her first play, “Another Paradise.” A finalist for numerous national poetry competitions and winner of the Masters Poetry Prize, she has had poems and stories published in The Greensboro Review, Poet & Critic, Sycamore Review, Notre Dame Review and other literary magazines and anthologies. A member of Dramatists Guild and Poets & Writers, she received two N.E.H. grants to study in Greece and grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Council for the Arts. A program of her poems was recently aired on Australian national radio. Makofske’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines and several anthologies. She have been awarded the Robert Penn Warren Prize, the Lullwater Review Prize, the Iowa Woman Magazine Prize and the Spoon River Poetry Review Prize. She also has been nominated by editors for the Pushcart Prize. She is the author of “The Disappearance of Gargolyes” (Thorntree Press) and “Eating Nasturtiums” (winner of the Flume Press chapbook competition). Her poems have been read on the Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day” on satellite radio and on public radio. Her current manuscript was a finalist or semi-finalist in several national competitions. The complete poetry reading schedule is: Oct. 7: Donna Spector and Mary Makofske. Oct. 21: Donna Reis and Howard Horowitz. Nov. 4: Fred Buell and Joan Siegel. Nov. 18: Joel Solonche and Michael Sciarretta. Dec. 2: Shotsie Gorman and Janet Hamill. “The educational, cultural and creative possibilities of this space should be used to benefit the community in addition to functioning as an independent bookstore,” said co-owner George Nitti. For information, call 986-6165.