Stephen Haynes-trumpet, cornet, flugelhorn 
Jerome Deupree-drums 
Steve Lantner-piano 
Josh Roseman-trombone 
Joe Morris-bass 
Ciaran Berry was born in Dublin and grew up in Connemara and Donegal. He is the author of four collections of poetry, States (2025), Liner Notes (2018), The Dead Zoo (2013), and The Sphere of Birds (2008), all published by The Gallery Press. His work has been featured in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Best of Irish Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review. The accolades his work has received include a Whiting Award, the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize, the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and two Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in West Hartford and co-directs the Creative Writing Program at Trinity College. 
Luisa Caycedo-Kimura is a Colombian-born writer, educator, and the author of All Were Limones (The Word Works, 2025), winner of the Hillary Tham Capital Collection competition. Other honors include a Connecticut Office of the Arts Emerging Recognition Award, a John K. Walsh Residency Fellowship at the Anderson Center, an Adrienne Reiner Hochstadt Fellowship at Ragdale, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, her poems appear in Four Way Review, Denver Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Rattle, Mid-American Review, RHINO, and elsewhere. — About Riverwood Poetry Series The Riverwood Poetry Series, Inc. is a non-profit arts organization committed to promoting and appreciating poetry in Connecticut. RPS, Inc. is invested in providing entertaining and thought-provoking programming while responding to the needs of our neighbors through community outreach and collaboration. From their Facebook page: “The Riverwood Poetry Series has innovated many programs since our inception, all free to the public. We provide entertaining and thought-provoking poetry in a relaxed atmosphere.” 
Sean Thomas Dougherty’s twenty books include The Dead are Everywhere Telling Us Things, winner of the 2021 Jacar Press Full Length Book Prize, and Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His book The Second O of Sorrow (BOA Editions 2018) received both the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the Housatonic Book Award. His many awards include two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Fellowships, the Established Artist Fellowship for Northwest Pennsylvania, a US State Department Fulbright Lectureship, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review. Dougherty teaches writing part-time for Western Connecticut State University’s Master of Fine Arts Program and works as a Med Tech and caregiver for people recovering from traumatic brain injuries in Erie, Pennsylvania. — About Riverwood Poetry Series The Riverwood Poetry Series, Inc. is a non-profit arts organization committed to promoting and appreciating poetry in Connecticut. RPS, Inc. is invested in providing entertaining and thought-provoking programming while responding to the needs of our neighbors through community outreach and collaboration. From their Facebook page: “The Riverwood Poetry Series has innovated many programs since our inception, all free to the public. We provide entertaining and thought-provoking poetry in a relaxed atmosphere.” 
With performances by Ezra Moth, Maljo Blu, Mx. Ology, and Amygdala Presented in conjunction with Ezra Month’s immersive eco-art installation at Real Art Ways, Megafauna: a selection of biomimetic drag takes the sculptural and narrative elements of the exhibition and gathers them into a night of performance art. Considering drag as an artistic medium in its own right, each of the drag performers will stage a spectacle inspired by biological entities and processes. They will sing songs and tell stories about the sea and the sky, about fungus and bacteria, about algae and fish, about birds and bugs – all layered with a healthy dose of camp and queerness. 
A man and his sister discover something sinister in the skies above their California horse ranch, while the owner of a nearby theme park tries to profit from the mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon.
“Fearsomely entertaining, consistently thought-provoking and occasionally bloody scary.” – Observer (UK)
“A sharp, often funny meditation on the terrifying power of human connection.” – The Atlantic
Even as the central characters are enveloped by doom, Peele provides a haunting image of a black family that is both unsuspecting and frighteningly unfuckwithable.” – Harper’s Bazaar
93% on Rotten Tomatoes
Accompanied by her husband, son, and daughter, Adelaide Wilson returns to the beachfront home where she grew up as a child. Haunted by a traumatic experience from the past, Adelaide grows increasingly concerned that something bad is going to happen. Her worst fears soon become a reality when four masked strangers descend upon the house, forcing the Wilsons into a fight for survival. When the masks come off, the family is horrified to learn that each attacker takes the appearance of one of them.
“Peele seduces, subverts and manipulates audience expectations – as the masters Alfred Hitchcock, John Carpenter, and Stanley Kubrick did before him.” – IndieWire
“It’s a game-changer.” – Sydney Morning Herald
“By focusing the storyline on a particular form of racism — the kind that’s often disguised as peculiar envy — Get Out reveals something more insidious.” – Salon.com
“Beneath the beatific smile of 21st-century liberalism, Get Out finds the still grinning ghoulish skull of age-old servitude and exploitation unveiled during a rollercoaster ride into a very American nightmare.” – Observer (UK)
“Peele succeeds where sometimes even more experienced filmmakers fail: He’s made an agile entertainment whose social and cultural observations are woven so tightly into the fabric that you’re laughing even as you’re thinking, and vice-versa.” – TIME Magazine
98% on Rotten Tomatoes
Now that Chris and his girlfriend, Rose, have reached the meet-the-parents milestone of dating, she invites him for a weekend getaway with Missy and Dean. At first, Chris reads the family’s overly accommodating behavior as nervous attempts to deal with their daughter’s interracial relationship, but as the weekend progresses, a series of increasingly disturbing discoveries leads him to a truth that he never could have imagined.
On Friday, July 18, 7 pm, we will present the film, followed by a Q&A with Jeff Bravin, the Executive Director of ASD. To attend this special screening event, we encourage you to purchase your tickets in advance. 
Playing on June 6th are:
Shelley Nicole – Vocals/Conduction
“Doggerel is an apt name for this lovely collection, with the canine hidden in plain sight in its title and coursing through so many of the poems. Betts manages to capture essences of memory, of hope or loss, of oft-overlooked everydayness—in a way that feels surprising and familiar at once.”—Dr. Alexandra Horowitz, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know With his transcendent collection of poetry, Felon (Norton, 2019), Reginald Dwayne Betts became our foremost chronicler of the ways prison shapes and transforms American masculinity. A 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Betts is also celebrated for his work as a lawyer and the founder and director of Freedom Reads, a first-of-its-kind organization that is radically transforming access to literature in prison. Published on the twentieth anniversary of Betts’s release from prison, DOGGEREL is a majestic new volume of poetry that marks a transformative stage in his life and career. This resplendent tableau ruminates on dogs and the ostensibly trivial joys that transform us—peonies blooming, a “symphony” of wine glasses, father-son bike rides, basketball, seeing and being seen, surrendering to a lover’s touch. Channeling dogs both literally and metaphorically, these poems trace everything from the companionship of Betts’s own Jack Russell Terrier to the ways we are dogged by our deepest desires for connection, love, and repair. On the volume’s title page, Betts offers two definitions of doggerel (DAW-guh-ruhl): 1. of verse: comic, burlesque, and usually composed in irregular rhythm. Also: (of verse or writing) badly composed or expressed; trivial. 2. nah, just a Black man writing poems about his dog, all the dogs he encounters on the street, how having an extra four feet changed his world, then he falls in love. Betts’s poems then pull us into a revelatory lyrical world. Deploying the pantoum, ghazal, and canzone, he excavates companionship and what it means to bear witness. — This event is FREE to the public, but will require advance registration. Books will be sold onsite by River Bend Bookshop, on the day of the event. Concessions will be open and available if guests want to purchase beverages, popcorn, and snacks. — 
Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of three books of poetry, including the best-selling Felon. He is a poet, lawyer, and the founder and CEO of Freedom Reads. (Photo courtesy of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.) 
Photo of Catherine Masud by Peter Morenus/UConn
Gaurav Mukherjee is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law, where he writes about how constitutional law shapes and is shaped by democratic politics. He is a frequent commentator on Connecticut politics, and his newer work explores how the arts respond to moments of constitutional and human rights crises. Among others, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the California Law Review, BYU Law Review, and the Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights. Pat Mottola teaches Creative Writing at Southern Connecticut State University, where she earned an M.S. in Art Education and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. An award-winning poet and Pushcart Prize nominee, her work is published nationwide in War, Literature & the Arts, Connecticut Review, Main Street Rag, San Pedro River Review, VietNow Magazine, and Paterson Literary Review. Pat is the President of the Connecticut Poetry Society. She served as editor of Connecticut River Review from 2012–2017. On a global scale, she mentors Afghan women writers living in Afghanistan and beyond. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Under the Red Dress, After Hours, and A Town Like That. Pat was the recipient of the prestigious CSCU system-wide Board of Regents Outstanding Teacher Award in 2019, as well as the J. Philip Smith Outstanding Teacher Award in 2021. Pat is the Poet Laureate of Cheshire, CT.
James Finnegan has published poems in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in the anthologies Good Poems: American Places edited by Garrison Keillor; Laureates of Connecticut; Shadows of Unfinished Things; Imagining Vesalius; Waking Up to the Earth; and Of Hartford in Many Lights. For a decade, he served as president of the Friends & Enemies of Wallace Stevens (stevenspoetry.org). He posts aphoristic ars poetica on the blog ursprache: https://ursprache.blogspot.com/.
— About Riverwood Poetry Series The Riverwood Poetry Series, Inc. is a non-profit arts organization committed to promoting and appreciating poetry in Connecticut. RPS, Inc. is invested in providing entertaining and thought-provoking programming while responding to the needs of our neighbors through community outreach and collaboration. From their Facebook page: “The Riverwood Poetry Series has innovated many programs since our inception, all free to the public. We provide entertaining and thought-provoking poetry in a relaxed atmosphere.”
Larry Ochs-tenor, soprano saxophone Larry Ochs works on and breathes music. He composes. He plays saxophone. He looks for adventurous ideas to take on and for other artists – musicians and friends in other art mediums – to take them on with him.
Ochs is primarily found in the worlds of “avant-garde” or “improvised music.” That means that he composes music for “structured improvisation” in general, and in particular for musicians steeped in the art of improvisation, an art form that has really only come into its own in Western music in the past 50 years, primarily thanks to the development of jazz as influenced by the blues and then by Western art music, as well as to the increased exposure of Western musicians to the music of Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. But any artists in the visual arts or other performance-based arts that have an interest in taking chances are welcomed in. Thus, for example, he has worked with Shinichi Iova Koga and his dance group inkBoat; he and Rova have collaborated with We Players, a very cool theater company in the Bay Area, and has toured and recorded with Korean performance artist and vocalist Dohee Lee.
Learn more about Larry here.
Avram Fefer/Sean Conly/Michael Wimberly
Sound It Out NYC, November 10, 2018
Joe Morris-bass Joe Morris is a composer/improviser multi-instrumentalist who plays guitar, double bass, mandolin, banjo, banjouke electric bass and drums. He is also a recording artist, educator, record producer, concert producer/curator and author. His is considered to be one of the most original and important improvising musicians of our time. Down Beat magazine called him “the preeminent free music guitarist of his generation.” Will Montgomery, writing in The Wire magazine called him “one of the most profound improvisers at work in the U.S.” He is originally from New Haven, Connecticut. At the age of 12 he took lessons on the trumpet for one year. He started on guitar in 1969 at the age of 14. He played his first professional gig later that year. With the exception of a few lessons he is self-taught. The influence of Jimi Hendrix and other guitarists of that period led him to concentrate on learning to play the blues. Soon thereafter his sister gave him a copy of John Coltrane’s OM, which inspired him to learn about Jazz and New Music. From age 15 to 17 he attended The Unschool, a student-run alternative high school near the campus of Yale University in downtown New Haven. Taking advantage of the open learning style of the school he spent much of his time playing music with other students, listening to ethnic folk, blues, jazz, and classical music on record at the public library and attending the various concerts and recitals on the Yale campus, including performances by Wadada Leo Smith. He worked to establish his own voice on guitar in a free jazz context from the age of 17, drawing on the influence of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor,Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman as well as the AACM, BAG, and the many European improvisers of the ’70s. Later he would draw influence from traditional West African string music, Messian, Ives, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Lyons, Leroy Jenkins, Steve McCall and Fred Hopkins. After high school he performed in rock bands, rehearsed in jazz bands and played totally improvised music with friends until 1975 when he moved to Boston. Learn more about Joe here. 