In conjunction with the exhibit, “The Avenue: A History of Washington Street,” the Hoboken Historical Museum is pleased to announce the first of several themed programs: “Street Corner Talking,” a live poetry event. On Sunday, Sept. 26, from 4 – 5 pm, six poets will take turns reading a selection of their own poems, one or two of which take Hoboken as a subject or setting. Anyone who is uncomfortable with an indoors event is invited to tune in on one of the Museum’s livestream channels, Facebook, YouTube or Twitter.  

Admission is $5, free for Museum members, and per state requirements for indoor events, proof of vaccination is required, and face masks are encouraged. 

The featured poets offered the following observations on their work and lives:

Buttered Roll is a poet, visual artist and performer. He is making a concerted effort to locate his car keys, among many other things. Buttered Roll has been a featured performer at numerous venues across the greater NYC area and his work has been published in Breadcrumbs Magazine, The Esthetic Apostle and Mother Water Vol. I. In August 2020, Buttered Roll released his first book: “Quarantine: Solo.” Haters will say it’s a zine. Buttered Roll recently wrapped up Exile In Orange, a solo exhibit at Smush Gallery in Jersey City, NJ.

Cyndi Dawson is a poet and performance artist who has fronted the rock band The Cynz for ten years. The Cynz have released four albums and can be heard on Sirius, internet and international radio. Her poetry has appeared in over 75 anthologies and magazines. She has three chapbooks, the most current is Outside Girl (published by Hoboken’s own Poets Wear Prada Press). Cyndi has performed internationally as a poet, often accompanied by a backing band of musicians and has released two CDs of spoken word performances: Inside of Outside with Jair Rohm Parker Wells, and another one which accompanied her book. 

Nancy Bevilaqua first saw Hoboken in about 1987, when she was enrolled in the M.A. program in Creative Writing (Poetry) at NYU (it was love at first Brass Rail Weiss-beer). She soon moved into the back room at Maxwell’s, and apartments all over town. She has worked as a Caseworker/Counselor for people with AIDS and the homeless, and later as a freelance travel-writer. Her poems have been published in the journals West Branch, Prelude, Tupelo Quarterly, Whiskey Island, Juked, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She is once again living in Hoboken (with no plans to ever move anywhere else) with her son Sandro, who is studying Composition and Film-Scoring at Berklee College of Music, and her dog Naima, who studies various scents on the sidewalks.

Roxanne 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.

Joel Lewis is the author of My Shaolin: A Poem of Staten Island, North River Rundown, Surrender When Leaving Coach, Learning From New Jersey, Vertical’s Currency and House Rent Boogie, the winner of the second (and last) Ted Berrigan Memorial Award. He edited Bluestones and Salt Hay, an anthology of contemporary NJ poets, as well as Reality Prime, the selected poems of Walter Lowenfels, and On The Level Everyday, the selected talks of Ted Berrigan.

Danny Shot’s WORKS (New and Selected Poems) was published in March 2018 by CavanKerry Press. Danny is currently an Associate Editor of A Gathering of the Tribes (https://www.tribes.org/) online. He was featured on the television show State of the Arts, NJ, in July 2018. Danny lives in Hoboken, NJ (home of Frank Sinatra and baseball), where he is poet-in-residence of the Hoboken Historical Museum. Danny Shot was longtime publisher and editor of Long Shot arts and literary magazine, which he founded along with Eliot Katz in 1982 in New Brunswick, NJ. Check out his new website: https://dannyshot.com/