Oak Park performance poet and author Charlie Rossiter will perform with three of his talented poet friends from around the country on Saturday, March 3 at 2 pm at Oak Park Public Library, 834 Lake Street. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Laura Boss from New Jersey and M. L. Liebler, an internationally recognized and much published Detroit poet, will join Rossiter for this special event which is free and open to the public.

Charlie Rossiter, Oak Park poet, NEA Fellowship recipient, and four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, hosts the audio website www.poetrypoetry.com [1]. He is the author of four books of poetry and numerous chapbooks and has led workshops all over the country. His poetry has been featured on NPR, and at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in NJ and the Chicago Blues Festival. He is the book review editor for the Journal of Poetry Therapy. His recent book, All Over America: Road Poems, (FootHills Publications, 2009) is based on 60,000+ miles of road trip experiences throughout U.S. and Canada. For more information see www.charlierossiter.com [2]. Several U.S. Poet Laureates are featured in interviews and/or reading from their work on www.poetrypoetry.com [1].

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions). Her latest book is What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010). She is the Founder /Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published twelve books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions). With her daughter Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers).

Ms. Gillan has read her work at colleges, universities, poetry centers, and festivals throughout the USA including Harvard University, University of California at Santa Barbara, Longfellow House, Cambridge, the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, Wesleyan University, and Georgetown University, among many others. She has also read at poetry festivals internationally in Yugoslavia, Sicily, Italy, France, Malta, Wales, and Finland. She was named Connecticut State Touring Poet in 2009.
                                         
M. L. Liebler is an internationally known and widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist, and arts organizer. Liebler is the author of 13 books including the award-winning Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (Wayne State University Press 2008) featuring poems written in and about Russia, Israel, Germany, Alaska, and Detroit. Wide Awake won both the Paterson Poetry Prize for Literary Excellence and the American Indie Book Award for 2009. In 2005, he was named St. Clair Shores (his hometown) first Poet Laureate. Liebler has read and performed his work in Israel, Russia, China, France, UK, Macao, Italy, Germany, Spain, Finland, and most of the 50 states.

Liebler has taught English, American Studies, Labor Studies, Canadian Studies, and World Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980. He is the founding director of both the National Writer's Voice Project in Detroit and the Springfed Arts: Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization. He was recently selected as Best Detroit Poet by The Detroit Free Press and  Detroit's Metro Time, and in he is the nation's first ever Artist in Residence for a Public Library at The Chelsea District Library for 2008-2009. In 2010, he received The Barnes & Noble Poets & Writers for Writers Award with Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Diaz.  His Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams (Coffee House Press) won the 2011 Michigan Public Library Notable Book Award. For more information, see www.mlliebler.com [3].

Laura Boss was a first place winner of PSA's Gordon Barber Poetry Contest. Founder and editor of Lips, she is the recipient of three NJSCA Poetry Fellowships.  In June 2011 she won the International Poetry Award at the first Swansea International Poetry Festival in Wales. Her books include Reports from the Front (CCC), Arms: New and Selected Poems (Guernica), and Flashlight (Guernica). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times.

These friends of Charlie Rossiter’s are visiting Chicago to attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference.

Find more events happening at Oak Park Public Library at http://oppl.org/events/calendar [4].