Please join the Hoboken Historical Museum and Poet In Residence Danny Shot in celebrating 25 (plus one) years of CavanKerry Press! 

🗓️ Sunday March 22
⏰ 4 pm
📍 Hoboken Historical Museum
🎟️ Free admission

As a not-for-profit literary press serving art and community, CavanKerry Press is committed to expanding the reach of poetry and other fine literature to a general readership by publishing works that explore the emotional and psychological landscapes of everyday life.

Founded in 2000 in Fort Lee, New Jersey by Joan Cusack Handler and Florenz Eisman, CavanKerry began with the aim to demystify poetry. The idea has grown and the press has continued to bring poetry to people where they live, work, and receive services.
As of March 2026, CavanKerry Press has published 136 volumes. Our 96 authors are geographically, culturally, economically, and stylistically diverse. The list of authors includes Hoboken Historical Museum’s own Danny Shot.

Our features include:
🎤 Joan Cusack Handler is a poet, memoirist, and psychologist. She has published three verse memoirs—GlOrious, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, and Orphans— and one prose memoir, Confessions of Joan the Tall. With Gabriel Cleveland, she coedited Places We Return To, an anthology of selections from the first 100 books published by CavanKerry Press, the press she founded in 2000 and continues to serve as publisher. Her poems are widely published and have received awards from Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. She is also the author of the PsychologyToday.com series, “Of Art and Science.”

🎤 Gabriel Cleveland is a poet and fiction writer with an MFA in Poetry from the Solstice Creative Writing Program. Along with Joan Cusack Handler, he co-edited Places We Return To, a 20th Anniversary retrospective on the publishing history of CavanKerry Press. An avid video gamer and music lover, he hosts The Andover Special (a weekly internet radio program on HomeGrownRadioNJ) and sings Bass II in Jersey City’s North River Sing Community Chorus. Gabriel is also a mental health advocate, often working online to raise awareness, visibility, and money for psychological and psychosocial issues. Prior to his time with CavanKerry Press, he spent several years in the field of caregiving for people with increased physical and/or mental needs and wants you to know that you’re not alone

🎤 Catherine Doty is a poet, artist, and teacher from Paterson, New Jersey. She is the author of two volumes of poems with CavanKerry Press: Momentum (2004), winner of a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, and Wonderama (2021), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. Doty has for decades worked as a visiting poet for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Frost Place, and countless schools, and was named the New Jersey State Council on the Arts’ inaugural Distinguished Teaching Artist. A featured reader at the Dodge Poetry Festival, her work has appeared on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac, as well as in many journals and anthologies. Doty is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

🎤 Joseph O. Legaspi authored the collections Amphibian, Threshold, and Imago and the chapbooks Postcards; Aviary, Bestiary; and Subways. He works at Columbia University, teaches at Fordham University, and resides in Queens, New York.