Sleepy Hollow, NY - The Slapering Hol Press Second Friday Café Reading Series at the Hudson Valley Writers Center presents the third annual Veteran’s Day Reading: Poets and Writers on War and Peace, featuring selections by poet, novelist and activist Daniela Gioseffi  and Poet Fran Castan.

Community  readers include: Llyn Clague, Reggie Marra, Andrea L Alterman, Tom Milton, Terry M Duggan, Elizabeth Young McNally, Sandra Lee Morris, Rhett Watts, Jennifer Lang, Sandra Berris, Catherine Gonick, Yselle Shapiro and Mae Aiello.  Host for the evening is Cindy Beer-Fouhy.

Officially founded by Margo Stever in 1990, the Slapering Hol Press (Old Dutch for Sleepy Hollow) launched its first publication, the anthology, Voices from the River,   and is currently co-edited by Margo Stever and Suzanne Cleary. Besides publishing anthologies, the Slapering Hol Press is one of the few small presses to present chapbooks by promising poets who have not previously published in book form. Since 1990, the SHP has conducted a national competition. For more than a decade, the Slapering Hol Press has brought to light emerging talent whose diverse themes of survival and hope cross cultures. On a strong foundation of aesthetic quality, the Press has earned a solid reputation and sustained an enduring tradition of discovering some of the strongest voices in contemporary poetry. The Slapering Hol Press created its own literary series, with a mission of providing an audience for emerging poets. Furthermore, some additional new initiatives include an on-line quarterly newsletter that targets an extensive mailing list with news of the Slapering Hol Press, their authors, and upcoming readings. The SHP has also organized additional readings for SHP authors and Advisory Board members in established New York poetry venues.

The Slapering Hol Press reading series is made possible in part by a grant from poet Linda Ashear. HVWC readings are made possible in part by grants from the Bydale Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, the David G. Taft Foundation, and the Thendara Foundation; with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, a State agency, and by Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government.

Hudson Valley Writer Center is located at the Philipse Manor Railroad Station 300 Riverside Drive, Sleepy Hollow NY. For information call 914 332 5953.

Featured Poets’s Bios:
Daniela Gioseffi is a poet, novelist, editor, literary critic, and peace and social justice activist who has taught and lectured widely throughout the U.S. and Europe. She published WOMEN ON WAR winning an American Book Award, (Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster: 1990.) The book was also published in Vienna in German translation in 1991. An all new edition appeared from the Feminist Press: NY, 2003. Her early books include, EGGS IN THE LAKE (Boa Editions, Ltd., 1980) which won a grant award from The New York State Council for the Arts in poetry, and a novel, THE GREAT AMERICAN BELLY, (Doubleday/Dell/New English Library, New York, London, and Zagreb, 1979.) She won a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, 1990, for "Daffodil Dollars," aired on “The Sound of Words” and has read her work widely appearing on numerous NPR and BBC radio and television stations. A treatise on the woman's dance of birth, as counterpart to the male war dance in folk cultures, EARTH DANCING: MOTHER NATURE'S OLDEST RITE, 1981, was related in theme to WOMEN ON WAR: INTERNATIONAL WRITINGS (The Feminist Press, NY, 2003.) During the 1980’s, she served as president of her local New York chapter of the National Peace Action. On the nominating committee of The Olive Branch Awards, she served on the board of  The Writers and Publishers Alliance for Nuclear Disarmament. The Ploughshares Fund, an independent peace foundation, awarded her grants for Women's Leadership Development.  She was the U.S. Keynote speaker at The Feminist International Book Fair in Barcelona, 1990, attended by Petra Kelly and Grace Paley among numerous other writers and activists for world peace. Active in the Civil Rights Movement in the early l960's, she published ON PREJUDICE A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE (Anchor/Doubleday, 1993.) She edits www.PoetsUSA.com, a website, which incorporates WiseWomensWeb – nominated for "Best of the Web, 1998". Her latest books of poetry are WORD WOUNDS and WATER FLOWERS and GOING ON, from VIA Folios @ Purdue U.1995 and 2000, and SYMBIOSIS; POEMS 2002 from Rattapallax Press: NY  Her latest book is BLOOD AUTUMN, Autunno di sangue, VIA FOLIOS/Bordighera Press at the Calandra Institute of The City Unversity of New York. All are available at Amazon.com. Along with William Carlos Williams’s and Walt Whitman’s, her verses have been etched in marble on a wall of PENN Station’s 7th Avenue Concourse. In 2007, Daniela won The John Ciardi Award, $1,000, for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry and in 2008, the New York State OSIA Literary Award. Daniela and has lived for the last 42 years in Brooklyn Heights, New York City.

Fran Castan taught writing and literature at The School of Visual Arts in Manhattan for 25 years, Prior to that she was on the editorial staffs of The New Yorker and Scholastic Magazines.  During the Vietnam war, she lived in Hong Kong with her first husband, Sam Castan, who was the Asia correspondent for Look Magazine until his death in Vietnam in 1966.  Castan is currently working on new poems from a collection in progress, “Sonnets for Siv,” a remembrance of her friend, the poet Siv Cedering, who died in November, 2007. In addition, Castan poem "Hiccups," for her grandson appeared in the journal Poiesis in 2007 and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Also, in 2007, she published "Authority," in the anthology Broken Land:  Poems of Brooklyn, ( N.Y.U. Press.) She will be reading selections from her books of poems The Widow's Quilt (Canio Editions, NY)  and Lifeboa (her C.D. collection.) She has given readings at The Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival and the Seattle Poetry Festival.  Her award-winning poems have appeared in dozens of journals, including Poetry Magazine and anthologies published by Norton, Scribners' and Doubleday, among others. She lives in East Hampton, Long Island, with her husband, the artist, Lewis Zacks.

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