Poets R.G. Rader and Joan Cusack Handler to read March 15 in South Brunswick

A press release from the South Brunswick Arts Commission:

R.G. Rader, an award-winning poet and playwright, and Joan Cusack Handler -- essayist, creative writer and psychologist -- will be the guest readers on Sunday, March 15 at South Brunswick's monthly series of Sunday poetry readings. The program, sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission, in conjunction with the South Brunswick Public Library, starts at 2 p.m. in the library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction.

Rader is also an actor, director and a professor of English and Theater. He is publisher and editor of Muse-Pie, a small poetry press founded in the early 1980s and recently revived in 2007. His poetry has been widely published, earning him a Merit Book award for his collection of haiku, Neon Shapes. His collected works of haiku and tanka, Raising the Blade, is online published by AHA Press. His longer work of poetry has also been widely published over the years in online journals, magazines, and hard copy journals including Tiferet, Black Swan Review, Cerebration, Lunch, Stepping Stone, Passaic Review and The Paterson Review. His collection of poetry, Kicking the Rain, will be published early summer by Finishing Line Press.

In addition to his work as poet and publisher, Rader is a playwright and a member of The Dramatists Guild of America and the National Audio Theatre Festivals. He is an actor and playwright in residence with Arrowhead Theater Company, a professional theater company he co-founded and which primarily focused on productions in New York City. His stage and audio plays have been performed and heard (audio) throughout the country. Raderalso has published a number of essays on poetry and is a contributor to "Society Matters," a British political journal of the Open University. He lives in Passaic, NJ.

A native of the Bronx, Ms. Handler's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and Southern Humanities Review, and have received awards from The Boston Review as well as five Pushcart nominations. Her first poetry collection, GlOrious, debuted in 2003 and its CD followed in 2007. Her second book of poems, The Red Canoe: Love in Its Making, explores the anatomy of a marriage and will appear in October, 2008. She is currently finishing her third book (this time prose), Confessions of Joan the Tall: A Memoir in Two Voices; Book I, is the voice of Joan, an Irish Catholic girl of 12 living in the Bronx in 1954.

In her "other lives" Handler is an essayist, creative writing teacher, psychologist in clinical practice and the publisher and senior editor of CavanKerry Press, a not for profit literary press that serves both art and community. She has served as resident faculty at The Robert Frost Place Center for the Arts and co-chair of the advisory board. Ms. Handler lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey and East Hampton, New York.

Admission to the poetry readings is free, though a donation of a nonperishable food item, which will be given to the South Brunswick Food Pantry, is encouraged.
The readings, sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission in cooperation with the South Brunswick Public Library, will continue through the spring of 2009, with the following program schedule:

• April 19: Sander Zulauf and Ken Hart
• May 3: The Idiom Magazine poets

For more information, including directions, contact the South Brunswick Arts Commission at (732) 329-4000, ext 7635.