Come to Elizabeth Park for a poetry reading and a stroll through the famous rose gardens…

2024 ROSE GARDEN READING featuring three Connecticut-based poets…

Saturday, June 15, 1PM Under the Tent in Elizabeth Park, Hartford, Connecticut

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer and visual artist. He is the author of two poetry books: the full-length collection Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022) and Ubasute, winner of the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. His honors include a MacDowell Stanford Calderwood Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature, and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets anthologies. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, Shenandoah, Pirene’s Fountain, Salamander, Cave Wall, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University.

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is an Educator and Activist fervent in achieving community augmentation through the literary arts. He is a Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in his native city of Norwich, CT and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Hartford. He is the recipient of the Nutmeg Poetry Award and the Connecticut of the Arts Fellow in Artist Excellence for Poetry/Creative Non-fiction. Knowles is a Pushcart prize nominee and the author of BlackRoseCity.

Cristina J. Baptista is a first-generation Portuguese-American educator, writer, and author of the poetry collections Taking Her Back (2021), which was a 2022 Connecticut Book Awards Finalist; and The Drowning Book (2017). Her work has appeared in Nimrod International Journal, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose, The Cortland Review, CURA,3Elements Literary Review, and elsewhere. Cristina has a Ph.D. in English from Fordham University and is a literature teacher at a private school in Connecticut. https://www.cristinajbaptista.com

2023 and 2024 Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize and Scholarship winners, Asia Hamilton and Shammia Martin, will be invited to read a poem.

Anita Durkin will give the introductions.

This reading is sponsored by the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens (stevenspoetry.org) with the support of the Elizabeth Park Conservancy (elizabethparkct.org).

For more information, contact: Jim Finnegan – JforJames@aol.com – 860-508-2810