Talking With Poets: James H Duncan and Melissa Anderson at Art Associates Gallery

Thom Francis welcomes poets James H Duncan and Melissa Anderson who shared their work at a special reading at the Art Associates Gallery in Albany on October 27, 2022.

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This coming Saturday, the Hudson Valley Writers Guild is teaming up with online literary journals Hobo Camp Review and Trailer Park Quarterly for a poetry reading featuring Steven Minchin, Melissa Anderson, Bunkong Tuon, Tony Gloeggler, Erin Lynn, and James H Duncan at MoJo’s Cafe and Gallery in downtown Troy.

Today we are going hear from two of those poets who shared their work at the Art Associates Gallery in Albany in October 2022

First up is James H Duncan with a “true story about the ghost in the guest room closet,” & another Halloween tale titled “October 31.” James Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review, a former editor with Writers Digest, and the author of Vacancy, Both Ways Home, and We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, among other books of poetry and fiction. He also reviews independent bookstores on his blog The Bookshop Hunter, and resides in Albany, NY.

And then, Melissa Anderson reads a piece titled “The Snake, or the Dream of the Werewolf” a meditation on tragedy.

Melissa Anderson is a writer, artist, and craftsman. Now a furniture maker by trade, she has worked variously in theater, the fine arts, and leather production, all of which influence her poetry. Like the constellations, she sees poems as navigational, both records Of the past and maps forward to the future. Her poetry explores the beauty in the banal and how the things we make help define who we are and the places we call home. She has been published in Cathexis Northwest Press and performs as a member of Slam Euphoria. Dogstar Poems, from Main Street Rag, is her first published collection.