The community is invited to a free reception on Sunday, March 11, 3 – 5 pm, to celebrate the launch of poet Danny Shot’s latest book, “Works.” Special guests will include poets Eliot Katz, Joel Lewis and Alicia Ostriker, and books will be available for purchase.  

WORKS honors “Long Shot,” the arts and literary magazine he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ, and edited for more than 20 years, with the credo of “Writing from the Real World.” This collection of poems traverses a course from the swamps of New Jersey to the endless possibilities of the open road, with rest stops along the way to visit with family ghosts, highlight striking moments encountered during a 30 plus year career as a New York City public high school teacher, and to report upon the twilight years of the Beat Generation. Shot’s engaging poetry is raw, from the gut, deceptively rich, and humane in the face of this increasingly post-humanistic world.

Born in the Bronx and raised in Dumont, NJ, by German Jewish refugees, Shot graduated from Rutgers College in 1980 with a B.A. in English. Shot’s poetry has appeared in: bum rush the page (Def Poetry Jam) Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe (Henry Holt), and The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Thunder’s Mouth), among other anthologies and numerous journals. Shot has read his poetry throughout the United States, also appearing on television (WNBC, New York) as part of Felipe Luciano’s Wordchestra. He has spent over 30 years as a NYC public high school teacher, serving in the South Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn. Mr. Shot lives in Hoboken, NJ (home of Frank Sinatra and baseball) where he is the most recent poet-in-residence of the Hoboken Historical Museum. (Author photo by John Dalton)