Artist Archive

2012-2013 Season

• Featured musicians, poets and writers;
• Free and open to the public;
• Sponsored by the MCC Foundation Annual Fund Campaign;
• Hosted by Stephen Campiglio.

« Return to main MMG page.

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May 16, 2013

Martín Espada
Featured Poet

Martín Espada’s most recent book, The Trouble Ball, won the Milt Kessler Award, a Massachusetts Book Award, and an International Latino Book Award. He was also awarded the 2013 Shelley Memorial Award for “a living American poet selected for genius and need by a jury of poets,” and his reading of a Frederick Douglass poem, along with an interview, recently aired on PBS for Moyers and Company. Called “the Latino poet of his generation,” Espada was born in Brooklyn, NY, and has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. Previous books of poetry include The Republic of Poetry (Norton, 2006), a collection which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. An earlier book of poems, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other books of poems include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990).  He has received other recognition, such as the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship.  His work has been widely translated, including collections that have been published in Spain, Puerto Rico, and Chile. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. For more information on the poet, please visit his website: www.martinespada.net.

* Martín Espada's reading is generously co-sponsored by MCC's English Department.

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Zaira Meneses
Classical Guitar

Zaira Meneses is one of the most exciting performers on the international classical guitar circuit. Her musicality and charisma have delighted audiences on three continents in a wide variety of programs, ranging from solo recitals to chamber music to highly acclaimed performances as a soloist with orchestra. Recent achievements include a special prize from Italy's prestigious Academia Chigiana, and the recording of several solo CDs, including her debut, "Latina," which are available through her website, www.zairameneses.com. She has also aroused considerable interest through the postings of several live performances on YouTube. Born in Xalapa, Mexico, she has traveled widely, performing in many of the great concert halls of the world, including Boston's Jordan Hall, New York City's YMHA and Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, and Salzburg's Wiener Saal, as well as performing Joaquin Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez and Concierto Madrigal for two guitars throughout Mexico. In her chamber work, she has collaborated with eminent pianists, such as Jon Kimura Parker and Virginia Eskin, with whom she has also appeared in lecture recital format. Meneses has served as artist in residence at prestigious universities throughout the United States, including Syracuse University, and is currently a member of the New England Conservatory Preparatory School faculty, where she teaches a special course in performance and entrepreneurial techniques. In addition, Meneses is director of Community Outreach and Student Affairs for the international Boston Guitar Festival and artistic director of the new cross-disciplinary cultural initiative, “Guitar and Friends,” for which she was awarded a special grant by the Albert Augustine Foundation. For more information on the artist, please visit the website mentioned above.

• Zaira Meneses’s program for Mishi-maya-gat will feature preludes by Manuel M. Ponce and J.S. Bach and a sonata by L. Brouwer.

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April 25, 2013

Ted Deppe
Featured poet

A Special Ireland-to-Manchester Appearance by Poets Ted Deppe and Annie Deppe, in Celebration of National Poetry Month

Ted Deppe is the author of Children of the Air and The Wanderer King (Alice James Books, 1990 and 1996); Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, Ireland, 2002); and Orpheus on the Red Line (Tupelo, 2009).  His work has appeared in Poetry, Harper’s, Ploughshares, New England Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. A recipient of two grants from the NEA and a Pushcart Prize, he has been writer in residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT, the Poet’s House in Donegal, Ireland, and Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.  Ted has taught creative writing in graduate programs in the U.S., Ireland, and England. He worked as an R.N. for nearly twenty years, mostly in Willimantic and Putnam, CT. He is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA program and directs Stonecoast in Ireland. Born in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised in Indiana, he and Annie Deppe moved to the west coast of Ireland in 2000.

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Annie Deppe
Featured poet

Annie Deppe is the author of two books of poetry, Wren Cantata (2009), and Sitting in the Sky (2003), both published in Ireland by Summer Palace Press. She is the recipient of writer’s grants from the Irish Arts Council and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her work has appeared in The Forward Book of Poetry 2004, a collection of the best poetry published in the U.K. and Ireland, and she has published widely on both sides of the Atlantic. She holds an MFA from Lancaster University, England, and was chosen to read in the Introductions Series of Poetry Ireland. She is Associate Coordinator of Stonecoast in Ireland and has co-directed three writers’ weeks for Curlew Writing Conferences. She was born in Hartford, raised in Woodstock, CT., and holds an MA in Educational Psychology from the University of Connecticut. She and Ted shared the visiting writer position at Westminster College in Utah in Spring 2012. Annie does private mentoring and manuscript critiques.

 

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Norman Johnson
with Featured Musicians - 8:00 PM

The Celebration Continues, with Norman Johnson on guitar, Don Wallace on bass, and Dianne Mower on vocals

Norman Johnson has been a performing jazz guitarist in the Connecticut area for more than 30 years.  He has performed with such notables as Dave Brubeck, George Coleman, Dianne Mower, Harvie S., Bill Mays, and Houston Person. He also performs with his quintet, “The Norman Johnson Group,” and has completed a CD with the group (and friends), which includes many of his original compositions. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, he lives in central Connecticut, where he also owns and operates Manor Recording Studio. He was the Dean of Music at the Hartford Conservatory in the 1990s and is presently a faculty member at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts.  His new CD is Get it While You Can,  available through Pacific Coast Jazz. For more information, please visit his web site: http://normanjohnsonguitar.com

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Dianne Mower
Featured Musician

Dianne Mower is an international recording artist and records on the Jazzcity and MoJo Labels. Currently she is working on her latest CD, recording the music of Dave Brubeck with Norman Johnson and Dan and Chris Brubeck. Her has also worked with the eleven piece swing band, The New Millennium Jazz Ensemble, led by pianist/arranger Bill Hind. She was the lead singer with the popular jazz vocal group, Jasmine, a tribute to Lambert, Hendricks & Ross. Ms. Mower has performed at the top clubs in New York City, including the Blue Note. She is also an accomplished lyricist. With the enthusiastic endorsement of Dave Brubeck, she has penned the lyrics to several of the master's tunes, including Unsquare Dance, Three to get Ready and Cable Car. For her inaugural CD, A Song for You, Dianne collaborated with renowned pianist Bill Mays, writing Peace Waltz and Snow Job, and with pianist Kent Hewitt on Chasin' the Blues, and in adding lyrics to Kenny Dorham's Blue Bossa. She has since joined with Norman Johnson to make Maybe September with The New Millennium Jazz Ensemble, released in 1995 and 1996, respectively. Although her emphasis is jazz, Dianne also sings folk, country, R&B, pop and Broadway music.  Since turning her attention to mostly jazz, she has looked to Ella Fitzgerald, Morgana King, Irene Kral, and Joe Williams for stylistic inspiration. Dianne continues to perform in the New England area and record, and teaches at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. For more information, please visit her web site: www.diannemower.com

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Don Wallace
Featured Musician

Don Wallace’s early formal training was as a classical player. His dream from pre-school years was to play the tuba, and the dream led eventually to a performance degree from the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music. He developed a taste for jazz when he began studying the bass in high school and continued playing through his college years, including electric bass for area bands, and found in that instrument what proved to be his most personal voice. After graduating from the Hartt School of Music, Don worked for more than 10 years as a studio bass player and singer doing jingle work in New York and Connecticut. He continues to play in jazz clubs throughout CT, in addition to his work as a music copyist.

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March 21, 2013

Frank Varela
Featured Musician

Frank Varela graduated from the Berklee School of Music in Boston and is a guitar instructor at Summit Studios in Manchester, as well as a private music instructor. He has also taught as a lecturer at the University of Connecticut and Manchester Community College, in addition to his after-school guitar program for the South Windsor Recreation Department. An accomplished guitar player and composer, he won a scholarship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his work has been favorably reviewed in the nationally renowned music magazine, Jazz Improv. Frank has played and composed music for six published CD recordings, including two Mystery Feet CDs. The first one, entitled "Walk the Walk," includes performances with jazz guitar legend, Larry Coryell. Frank also recorded with stellar drummers Lenny White (of Miles Davis and Chick Corea bands) and Joel Rosenblatt (from SpyroGyra) on the latest release, entitled "Upstream." He has also performed and recorded with such greats as Jimmy McGriff, Max Roach, Tony Trischka, Bill Keith, and Windham Hill Grammy winner, violinist, Darol Anger. Frank is currently working on a recording under his own name entitled, "2 Sides to Every Story.” He also has a solo DVD, "Rare Footage," on which he plays guitar and bass simultaneously. For more information, find Frank on Facebook: www.facebook.com/frank.varela.9

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Ellen LaFleche
Featured Poet

Ellen LaFleche's chapbook, Workers' Rites, won the Philbrick Poetry Award and was published by the Providence Athenaeum.  Other chapbooks include Ovarian (Dallas Poets Community Press) and Beatrice (forthcoming, Tigers Eye Press). Her poems have appeared in Mudfish, Many Mountains Moving, Spoon River Review, and Hunger Mountain, among many others. She won the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and the New Millennium Poetry Prize. She is the assistant judge of the Sports Writing Contest as www.winningwriters.com.

 

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Michael Casey
Featured Poet

Michael Casey grew up in Lowell, MA and an earned a B.S. in physics at Lowell Technological Institute. In 1968, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Vietnam, army experiences that became the basis for his first book, Obscenities, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poet Series in 1972. At the time of Obscenities publication, Michael was enrolled in a graduate physics program at SUNY Buffalo, and then changed his life course to pursue creative writing, studying under poets John Logan and Irving Feldman. He has continued to publish widely since then, including the poetry books, Millrat (Adastra Press), which is set in the dye house of a textile mill, and The Million Dollar Hole, named after the excavation pit at Fort Leonard Wood, where Army engineers were trained in earth moving equipment. Other books include Raiding a Whore House, Permanent Party, Cindi's Fur Coat, and The Bopper. His more recent title from Adastra Press is Check Points.

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February 21, 2013

Mark Lamoureux
Featured Poet

Mark Lamoureux is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Spectre (Black Radish Books, 2010), Astrometry Orgonon (BlazeVOX Books, 2008), 29 Cheeseburgers / 39 Years (Pressed Wafer, 2012), and Devotion (Desperanto, forthcoming, 2013), as well as the chapbook, Berlin Poems, which was written during and around a trip to Germany in 2008, featuring ekphrastic poems based on work in art museums in Munich and Berlin, including that of Max Beckmann, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Naum Gabo. His work has been published in print and online in Fence, miPoesias, Jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Ping•Pong, Conduit, Jacket, Fourteen Hills, and many others. In 2006, he founded Cy Gist Press (http://cygistpress.blogspot.com, a micropress focusing on ekphrastic poetry, and for which he continues to serve as editor.  He holds an M.F.A. from the New School and teaches English and literature in the CUNY system.

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Christina Strong
Featured Poet

Christina Strong grew up in Connecticut and took poetry workshops at Manchester Community College with Professor Clemwell Young.  She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont and has also lived in New Hampshire, California, Massachusetts, New York, and Hawaii. She codes and designs websites when she’s not traveling around the planet looking at pretty flowers. Her most recent books are Fifth Plateau (from Pink Adrenaline Star) from Propolis Press/Least Weasel and The New York School from Propolis Press., with poems forthcoming in West Wind Review. For more information, please visit her website: http://christinastrong.com.

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Ouroboros Saxophone Quartet
Featured Musicians

The members of the Ouroboros Saxophone Quartet are Tony Speranza, alto saxophone; Joseph Abad, soprano saxophone; Andrew Barnhart, baritone saxophone; and Max Schwimmer, tenor saxophone (also left to right in photo). Their set will feature an original piece by pianist, composer, arranger, and educator Ryan Jesperson, entitled, "Not Death, but Love." 

 The Quartet are graduate students (past and present) from The Hartt School of Music in West Hartford, Connecticut.  Since August 2009, the members have gained praise as winners of the Treetops Chamber Music Society Competition (2012, as the Ineo Saxophone Quartet), national finalists in the MTNA Chamber Music Competition (2012), semi-finalists in the North American Saxophone Alliance Quartet Competition (2012), and winners of the Paranov Concerto Competition at The Hartt School (2011).  In addition to being the premier saxophone quartet of Hartt’s honors chamber program, Performance 20/20, the members have performed in the local Hartford area (Wadsworth Atheneum, Tunxis Plantation Country Club, Mark Twain House and Museum, and J. René Coffee Roasters Music Series) and at national events, such as the 35th Annual International Saxophone Symposium at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA.

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Ryan Jesperson
Composer

Jesperson completed a doctorate in music composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he was president of the Composer's GUILD, and he also holds an Master's in Music from the University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music. For more information, please visit his website: www.ryanjesperson.com.

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January 17, 2013

Nick Cutroneo
Classical Guitar

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James Finnegan
Featured Poet

James Finnegan’s poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as in the recent anthology Good Poems, American Places (Penguin: 2012) edited by Garrison Keillor. With Dennis Barone, he edited Visiting Wallace: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Wallace Stevens (University of Iowa Press: 2009). Finnegan founded an internet discussion listserv called the NewPoetry List and he blogs aphoristic ars poetica at usrprache (http://ursprache.blogspot.com/). He coordinates the WordForge poetry reading series in West Hartford, and in 2011 was named the Poet Laureate of West Hartford CT.

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Bill O'Connell
Featured Poet

Bill O’Connell is the author of two collections of poetry, On the Map to Your Life (Dytiscid Press: 1992), and more recently, Sakonnet Point (Plinth Books: 2011). He is a social worker in western Massachusetts, and also teaches creative writing and literature at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, MA. O’Connell is a long-time member of Group 18, a poetry workshop in Northampton, MA that recently celebrated 25 years of operation with an anthology of 30-plus poets, eponymously titled Group 18.  Poets who have been involved with the group over the years include founders Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert.

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November 15, 2012

George Drew
Featured Poet

George Drew’s most recent book, The View from Jackass Hill, won the 2010 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize from Texas Review Press and appeared in 2011. His previous book, American Cool, won the 2010 Adirondack Literary Award for best poetry book of 2009. His work has been anthologized in The Southern Poetry Anthology, and he was twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He is the winner of several awards, such as the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Baltimore Review Poetry Prize, and the South Carolina Review Poetry Prize, and was runner-up for the 2009  Chautauqua Literary Journal Poetry Contest. For more information on George, please visit: www.georgedrew.com.

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Nancy White
Featured Poet

Nancy White is the author of Detour (Tamarack Editions, 2010). Her first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won the Washington Prize for poetry and a second edition was issued by The Word Works in 2009. Her poems appear in many journals, including Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Cincinnati Review, Diner, FIELD, The Journal, Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, Seneca Review, Sojourners, and Washington Square. For more info on Nancy, visit http://nancywhitepoetry.wordpress.com.

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JoyCo Jazz Trio
Featured Music

JoyCo Jazz Trio features Brian Kearsley, tenor saxophone; Hugh Allen, bass; and Ray Kingston, drums. The trio, which is an offshoot of the popular New England dance band JoyCo, plays mostly instrumental soul and jazz standards, as well as some suitably arranged pop tunes for jazz combo. For more information, please visit www.joycoband.com.

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Thursday, October 18

Featured poet Nicole Terez Dutton
7:00 pm

Nicole Terez Dutton's work has appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, 32 Poems, Indiana Review, and Salt Hill Journal. She earned an MFA from Brown University and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Cave Canem, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is the winner of the 2011 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her book, If One Of Us Should Fall, which will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2012. For more information on the poet, please visit www.nicoletdutton.com.

Music by 016 New Music Ensemble
8:00 pm

016 New Music Ensemble, based in Hartford, is dedicated to performing the works of contemporary composers in the classical music tradition. The ensemble is especially committed to performing the works of Connecticut composers. 016 has performed at Capital Community College, The Hartford New Music Festival at Billings Forge, The Women's Composers Festival of Hartford, and The Hartt School. The ensemble includes Janet Jacobson, violin; Sarah Washburn, violin; Kum Joung You, violin; ; Han-Wei Lu, cello; Sheri Brown, saxophone; Jordan Jacobson, trombone; and Murray Mast, percussion.

Janet Jacobson, violin, is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Violin Performance at the Hartt School as a student of Katie Lansdale, and is a member of the Performance 20/20 chamber music program. She holds a Master's degree from the Boston Conservatory, where she studied with Irina Muresanu. She has performed solo recitals at the Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as part of the Elderhostel Lecture-Recital Series in Boston, as well as chamber music appearances at the Killington Music Festival and at West Virginia University.

Sarah Washburn, violin, is an active performer across the East Coast, playing with the Waterbury and Wallingford Symphonies, the Connecticut Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra, the Irish band, Celtic Knots, and the West End String Quartet. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree with honors from Boston University and an Master of Music from the University of Hartford.

Originally from Seoul, South Korea, violinist Kum Joung You has earned international recognition, receiving the Harry King Award; the Julet Rosch Award; 1st Prize in the Concerto Competition at Eastern Kentucky University, and 2nd Prize in their Orchestra Award; and 2nd Prize in the National Violin Competition at Kimpo College in South Korea. He is also a two-time winner of the Hot Spring Summer Music Festival Violin Competition (2006, 2008). Mr. You hold a Master of Music degree in violin performance and a Graduate Professional Diploma in viola performance, both from the Hartt School, where he is now pursuing an Arists Diploma.

Taiwanese-born cellist Han-Wei Lu has performed in recitals and at music festivals in North and South America, Austria, and Taiwan. Ms. Lu has collaborated with such renowned musicians as Katy Lansdale, Marcy Rosen, and Bright Sheng. A founding member of the Sylvanus Ensemble and the 016 New Music Ensemble, Ms. Lu received her Master’s degree and Artist Diploma at The Hartt School, University of Hartford.

An active teacher and musician, saxophonist Sheri Brown holds a Master of Music in saxophone from the Hartt School and a Bachelor of Music Education from Michigan State University. In addition to her work as a proponent of new music in the Hartford area, Ms. Brown has been recognized as a finalist in the North American Saxophone Alliance National Conference classical competition (2007), winner of the Hartt Wind Ensemble Concerto Competition (2006), and has performed at the World Saxophone Congress, the Adolphe Sax International Competition, and the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition.

Trombonist Jordan Jacobson recently completed coursework for the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the College Conservatory of Music (CCM), University of Cincinnati. He is also a graduate of the Longy School of Music and Brigham Young University. A versatile musician, he has performed with the Orchestra at Temple Square, including frequent travel with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the Hartford Symphony, Utah Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Kentucky Orchestra, Lexington Philharmonic, and the Dayton Philharmonic, as well as the Queen City Brass Quintet and the Dayton Philharmonic Brass Quintet. He was also a member of the Salt Lake City area salsa band, Son del Callao, and has performed with the Salt Lake City Jazz Orchestra, the Salt Lake Alternative Jazz Orchestra, and with small jazz groups under his own direction.

Percussionist Murray Mast received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Akron and a Master's degree from the Hartt School, where he is in the final stages of completing a Doctor of Musical Arts in percussion. His studies have included classical percussion, jazz improvisation, and world percussion, including Cuban, Haitian, and Brazilian percussion, and a particular emphasis on steel drumming. Mr. Mast performs regularly with several Connecticut orchestras, including the New Haven, Greater Bridgeport, Waterbury, and New Britain symphonies.

For more information, please visit their website, www.016ensemble.com.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

8:00 p.m.
Featured Poets Marilyn Nelson and Michael Palma

Marilyn Nelson, CT's former State Poet Laureate from 2001-2006, professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, and 2012 winner of the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America, has a new poetry collection, Faster than Light: New and Selected Poems, due out from LSU Press in 2013. Regarding her earlier books: The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award; The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems, won the 1998 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize; Carver: A Life In Poems won the 2001 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book; Fortune's Bones was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry;

A Wreath For Emmett Till won the 2005 Boston Globe/Horn Book Award and was a 2006 Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a 2006 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a 2006 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book; and The Cachoeira Tales And Other Poems won the L.E. Phillabaum Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, three honorary doctorates, and a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Marilyn is also founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers' colony in CT.

Michael Palma's new poetry collection is Begin in Gladness (Star Cloud Press, 2011), and he has also published two previous chapbooks, The Egg Shape (1972) and Antibodies (1997) and one other full-length collection, A Fortune in Gold (2000), as well as an online chapbook, The Ghost of Congress Street: Selected Poems (2008), which is available at thenewformalist.com. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, including Northeast, Pivot, Chelsea, Café Review, Rattapallax, Raintown Review, Big City Lit, Italian Americana, Boston Book Review, and The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English, and other periodicals, and in anthologies, including Unsettling America and Wild Dreams. He is also an award-winning translator of Italian poetry, including a fully rhymed translation of Dante's Inferno, published by Norton in 2002 and reissued as a Norton Critical Edition in 2007. Other translations include titles from such prominent Italian poets as Guido Gozzano (The Man I Pretend to Be, 1981); Diego Valeri (My Name on the Wind, 1989); Sergio Corazzini (Sunday Evening, 1997); Luigi Fontanella (The Transparent Life and Other Poems, 2000); Franco Buffoni (The Shadow of Mount Rosa, 2002); Alfredo de Palchi (Dates and Fevers of Anguish, 2006; with Luigi Bonaffini); and Maurizio Cucchi (Jeanne d'Arc and Her Double, 2011). A former Elector of the Poets' Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, he is an associate editor of Gradiva and of The Journal of Italian Translation, and poetry editor of Italian Americana.

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7:00 p.m.
Kaleidos
Yovianna Garcia, classical guitarist; and Sayun Chang, multi-percussionist

Yovianna Garcia earned a bachelor of music at the Music Conservatory of Puerto Rico, under the tutelage of Leonardo Egúrbida, and a master of music degree in classical guitar performance at the University of Hartford's Hartt School of Music, under the guidance of Richard Provost. She has performed for the Miami International Guitar Festival, Connecticut Guitar Society, New Music Hartford contemporary music series, International Festival of Arts and Ideas, Primer Festival de Guitarra Clásica in Ponce, Puerto Rico, the Nutmeg Symphony in Connecticut, and the Hartford Baroque Players, and has toured in the United States, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. Her awards include Second Place at the National Classical Guitar Competition in Puerto Rico, the Guitar Department Award from the Conservatory of Puerto Rico, the Instrumental Performance Excellence Award from the Instituto de Música Juan Morel Campos, and the Thomas Armstrong Toro Fine Arts Excellence Award. Yovianna currently teaches in Hartt's Community Division, the Music and Arts Center in West Hartford, the Community School of the Arts at UConn, and at her own private guitar studio, as well as master classes and technique workshops for festivals, educative institutions, and guitar societies, including most recently Trinity College, the Connecticut Guitar Society, the Wheeler School, the Moultonborough Academy, and the Puerto Rico Music Conservatory. For more information on the artist, please visit yoviannagarcia.com.

Sayun Chang has collaborated with Taiwanese indigenous dance groups and performed in international folk festivals throughout Turkey, Greece, Canada and Hungary. She presented the world premiere of Che-Yi Lee's "Fantasy on the Love of Shiao-Guei Lake" for violin and marimba in Miao Li, Taiwan. During 2009 and 2010, she performed Anders Koppel's "Marimba Concerto No. 1" with The Sound of the Spring Orchestra, and also gave the world premiere of Feng-Hsu Lee's percussion concerto, "Love Songs from the Kalabai River," with the Evergreen Symphony Orchestra in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her master's degree from The Hartt School and bachelor's from Taipei National University of the Arts, and is currently a doctoral student at The Hartt School, where she studies orchestral percussion and multiple-hand drumming. Her past teachers have included Ted Piltzecker (Jazz Vibes), Rogerio Baccato (Brazilian drumming), John Amira (Cuban and Haitian drumming), and Joe Galeota (African drums). She was also a member of the Ju Percussion Group and Youth Concert Band in Taiwan.

A note on Kaleidos: kalos (beautiful) + eidos (form) = Kaleidos. The repertoire consists of a mix of diverse musical cultures and styles, including arrangements of aboriginal African and Taiwanese songs, Puerto Rican danza "El Coquí," and Brazilian samba and bossa nova, as well as more traditional art music selections from contemporary American and Argentinean composers. Every concert is meant to touch hearts and bring joy through the kaleidoscopic lens of the human expression, regardless of which culture it comes from.

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