THE GREY HAIR READING SERIES

Peg Boyers is Executive Editor of Salmagundi, the literary and humanities quarterly published at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, and author of two books of poems, Hard Bread and Honey With Tobacco. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Paris Review, The New Republic, Raritan, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Ontario Review, Slate, and other magazines. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Skidmore.

Hard Bread—Boyers' debut collection of verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg—was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers' own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet's Cuban-American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, father, and son-a postmodern Holy Family-whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. In familiar tableaux drawn from the Bible that have also inspired great works of visual art—the Annunciation, the Pietà, and Judgment Day—Boyers explores what it means in contemporary America to be "blessed among women," and whether and how art can contain grief. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers' determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.

Kathleen Betsko Yale is an actor who has performed on and Off-Broadway, in regional theatre and national road tours, and locally at Irish Classical Theatre Company, Kavinoky Theatre, Buffalo United Artists, and Theatre of Youth. She was last seen this season in Blithe Spirit at ICTC, and whenever she can joins Mary Kate O'Connell and the gang at Café in the Square on Wednesday nights in the long running Diva by Diva.

Betsko Yale was born in Coventry, England. She has lived just about everywhere (including NYC for many years), and earned a living at almost everything—textile worker, meter calibrator, bartender, Vista volunteer, gardener, churner—out of TV series ideas for Paramount in Hollywood, and dramatic writing teacher at UB and ECC. Somewhere along the way, she became an award-winning, published playwright whose work has been performed at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, England, and on some of America's most prestigious regional stages, including Yale Repertory, Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and New York Shakespeare Festival. Betsko Yale adapted her play Johnny Bull to an ABC-TV Movie of the Week starring Kathy Bates, Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, and Peter McNicol. Her own screen adaptation of that play won the Luminas Award for Excellence from the Women's Committee of the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a CAPS grant for her play Beggars Choice, a Foundation for the Arts grant for her play Stitchers and Starlight Talkers, and the ABC Theatre Award for Johnny Bull. She is also a three-time winner of fellowships at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, where the late Lloyd Richards—legendary theatre director, producer, and Chair of Drama at Yale—was her guide and mentor. In addition, Betsko Yale was founding mother and steering committee member of the First International Women Playwrights Conference, held first at UB in 1988, and now, almost 20 years later, an ongoing event taking place every three years in different world cities. She was co-author (with Rachel Koenig) of Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights (William Morrow & Co., 1987), and writes the occasional poem thanks to the Women of the Crooked Circle poets' collective and their beloved founder and poetry guide, Jimmie Margaret Gilliam. Last but not least, Betsko Yale has a daughter in Oklahoma, a son in Ohio, four grandkids, and two great-grand babies. She is wont to say at the drop of a theatrical cap: "I am proud to live and garden in the City of Buffalo with its fabulous architecture, rich cultural life, and dynamic theatre community. It is, by far, the friendliest city I've ever encountered in my lifetime of travel, adventure, and curious mishaps."

Earth's Daughters magazine—the oldest continuously published feminist literary arts periodical in the U.S.—is currently celebrating its 36th year. Its publication is made possible by a Decentralization grant from the Arts Council in Buffalo & Erie County, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Earth's Daughters magazine presents The Gray Hair Series, a monthly reading series hosted by Hallwalls and co-sponsored by Just Buffalo that spotlights primarily local or formerly local writers who have long contributed to the literary life of Buffalo and upstate New York.

Some publications related to this event:
December, 2007 and January, 2008 - 2007