The seventh event in the Hoboken Historical Museum’s #NJWomenMakeHistory series will take place Sunday, Dec. 6, at 4 pm, online only, featuring six contemporary women poets reading  their work. (details and registration link below)

#NJWomenMakeHistory is an eight-part lecture series focusing on New Jersey women who made their mark on history, as part of New Jersey’s celebration of the centennial of women’s right to vote. From groundbreaking photographer Dorothea Lange, to gender barrier-breaking baseball player Maria Pepe, both Hoboken natives, the series covers women who made history in a variety of spheres, including politics, finance, philanthropy, art, poetry and sports.

Guest speakers include distinguished authors and scholars, as well as the live participation of New Jersey women poets, and an in-person interview with Hoboken’s own Maria Pepe. The lecture series will be streamed online, and archived for later viewing on YouTube.

All talks are free to attend, thanks to a generous grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. Reservations are required for online participation. Visit https://bit.ly/NJWomenMakeHistory to reserve a spot.

Tickets

On Sunday, Dec. 6, at 4 pm, join us online to enjoy the work of six notable NJ poets, all women, in keeping with the theme #NJWomenMakeHistory.  The diverse line-up includes:

Tina Kelley: Her book Rise Wildly came out in October from CavanKerry Press, joining Abloom and Awry, Precise, and The Gospel of Galore, which won the Washington State Book Award. She co-authored Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope, and shared in a staff Pulitzer covering 9/11 at The New York Times. She and her husband have two children and live in Maplewood, NJ.    

Talena Lachelle Queen: with a BA, MFA, D.D., she is the founder and president of Her Best Self, a nonprofit organization that fosters leadership qualities in young women. She is a certified and licensed elementary school teacher specializing in Middle Level Humanities in both New Jersey and Washington states. A Paterson, NJ, native, she specializes in poetry infused with music, particularly gospel and jazz. Her writing addresses social justice issues that impact the Black community– her family. Among her alma mater are Rosa Parks School of Fine & Performing Arts High School, where she earned her diploma in Creative Writing, Montclair State University, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts in Broadcasting, University of Washington, where she earned both her Teaching Certification, and her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Poetics, and the University of Notre Dame where she earned an Executive Certification in Transformational Nonprofit Management at the Mendoza Business School. Queen is a martial artist, art lover and a gardener.

Joan Cusack Handler: A poet and memoirist, Handler is also a psychologist in clinical practice. Her poems have been widely published and have received awards from The Boston Review and five Pushcart nominations. She has three published books: her first poetry collection, GlOrious, is an anthem to adolescent rebellion in adulthood; the second, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, a verse memoir, explores the anatomy of a marriage–underbelly and crown; her third, Confessions of Joan the Tall, is a prose memoir written in the voice of her 11-year-old self—a very tall, Irish Catholic girl living in the Bronx in the 1950s. Her fourth and most recent book, Orphans, also a verse memoir, recounts the stories of her colorful Irish immigrant parents and her complicated relationship with them. The book tells three stories spoken in three distinct voices –her mother’s, her father’s, and her own– in three different forms. She is the founder and publisher of CavanKerry Press Ltd, a Bronx native who lives now in Fort Lee, NJ, and East Hampton, NY, and is married to a fellow psychologist.

Roxanne Hoffman: Hoffman runs the literary press Poets Wear Prada with Jack Cooper. Her words can be found in cyberspace (The IndieFeed Performance Poetry Channel Archive, Pedestal Magazine, New Verse News); set to music (David Morneau’s Love Songs); on the silver screen (2005 indie flick Love and the Vampire); and in print (The Bandana Republic: A Literary Anthology by Gang Members and Their Affiliates; Soft Skull Press; It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure, Harper Perennial). Her elegiac poem “In Loving Memory,” illustrated by Edward Odwitt, was released as a chapbook in 2011. Their second collaboration, The Little Entomologist, was published in 2018.

Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta: An associate professor in the English Department of the City University of New York’s Bronx Community College, Acosta received her Ph.D. in English—Latinx literature, from the University of Texas at San Antonio. She has presented and published her creative and scholarly work in London, England; Cartagena, Colombia; Catalonia, Spain; Buenos Aires, Argentina, and throughout the United States.  Her creative work has appeared in In Full Color: A Collection of Stories by Women of Color, Love You Madly: Poems About Jazz, Nineteen Sixty Nine: An Ethnic Studies Journal, Voices de la Luna, MiPoesias, Pembroke Magazine, Private International Photo Review, ¡Tex! Magazine, the NAACP Image Award-nominated Check the Rhyme, Chicago’s After Hours, The Reproductive Freedom Anthology, Basta!: 100 Latinas Write on Violence Against Women, The Lauryn Hill Reader, Paterson Literary Review, American Studies Journal, and the Chicana/Latina Studies Journal.  Her scholarly articles and essays can be found in The Routledge Companion to Latino/a Literature, African American Women’s Language, The Handbook of Latinos and Education, Western American Literature, Diálogo, Salon, English Kills Review, The Kenyon Review, and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.  She is the editor of Latina Outsiders Remaking Latina Identity (Routledge, 2019), an anthology featuring over 30 scholarly and creative works by Latinas from the U.S. Dr. Acosta is currently working on First Spanish, which tells the story of Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s.

paulA neves: A Luso-American writer, neves is a multi-media artist, Newark native, and recipient of the 2020 NJ Poets Prize from the Journal of NJ Poets. She is the author of the poetry chapbook “capricornucopia: the dream of the goats” (Finishing Line Press 2018) and the co-author with photographer Nick Kline of the poetry/photography risograph book Shirts & Skins (Shine Portrait Studio Press 2017). paulA co-produced with Boris Tsessarsky the short film “Every Alien Pen,” a selection at the 2019 NYC Independent Film Festival. Other writing has appeared in Newest Americans, City Brink, The Acentos Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Abuela Stories Project, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Writers of the Portuguese Diaspora, and elsewhere. Her visual art has appeared in various GlassBook Project collections and in shows at ArtFront Gallery, Gallery at 14 Maple, Index Art Center and the West Orange Arts Council. A graduate of the Rutgers Newark MFA in Creative Writing program, paulA was a teaching artist in residence for the GlassBook Project, has received fellowships from NYFA, CantoMundo, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Disquiet International Literary Program, among others, and is a co-founder of Kale Soup for the Soul, a collective of Luso-American writers, artists and performers, and of Brick City Collective of Newark writers, artists and activists. paulA’s work often focuses on themes of work, family, identity,(dis)placement, eco-justice and spirituality, and aims to honor immigrant forebears whose sacrifices have made much possible.

One lecture remains in the series: on Sunday, 12/13 at 4 pm, join us online for An Interview with Maria Pepe, the baseball gender-barrier breaker.

Visit the Museum’s YouTube channel for archived events.

In addition to a generous Action Grant of $16,500 from the NJ Council for the Humanities to fund this lecture series, the Hoboken Historical Museum received a $5,000 COVID-19 grant from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the federal CARES Act. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this [publication, program, exhibition, film, etc.] do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the New Jersey Council for the Humanities.