The 6th annual West End Poetry Festival will feature some of the Southeast's most talented poets while celebrating many exciting styles.

The event will be held at Carrboro Century Hall (located within the Carrboro Century Center at 100 North Greensboro Street Carrboro, NC 27510). The event begins at 11:00a.m. and continues throughout the afternoon and evening.

Below is a Profile and web site addresses of some of the 2011 Poets

Chris Slydel

Chris Slydel is from London England, lived in the USA since 1987, spent 15 years in West Palm Beach, Florida, always loved poetry, started writing about 10 years ago, stopped, started again about three years ago. Currently working as a physical therapist in rural Alamance county. He enjoys running, swimming, biking, art galleries and collecting antique toasters. My favorite poets include Neruda, Rossetti, Bucowski and Spike Milligan.

Title and description of presentation: Translations of Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre.I will read from my translations of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Cumaná, Venezuela, 1890 - Geneva, Switzerland, 1930), a poet whose three books, published in the 1920s, lay the foundations for contemporary Venezuelan poetry.

List of published books:
Caracas Notebook (New York: Cy Gist Press, 2006)
Phantasmal Repeats (Cambridge, MA: Petrichord Books, 2009)
Selected Writings of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (San Francisco: Auguste Press, 2012)

Honors:
Boston University Creative Writing Program Graduate Fellowship, 1998-1999

Alice Osborn M.A. is the author of two books of poetry, Unfinished Projects (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Right Lane Ends (Catawba, 2006); she is a blogger and speaker as well as a freelance writer and teaching artist. A former Raleigh Charter High School English teacher, Alice teaches creative writing in schools and in community settings where she uses sensory images and road-tested prompts to stimulate her students' best work. Her writing has appeared in Raleigh's News and Observer, Soundings Review, The Pedestal Magazine, and in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her husband and two children.

Is the author of two chapbooks: Already It Is Dusk, from Brooklyn Arts Press, and Sleigh Ride, from Factory Hollow Press. Other work of his can be found at jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Hollins Critic, Poetry International, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Originally from Lansing, he earned his BA at the University of Michigan. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has lived in North Carolina since 2005. He currently lives in Carrboro and is a doctoral student in English Literature at UNC, where he also works as an editorial assistant for the William Blake Archive.

Dianne Timblin lives, writes, and edits in Durham, North Carolina. Her poetry has appeared in Talisman, Phoebe, Rivendell, Fanzine, and Foursquare, among other journals, and was included in Kate Schapira's collaborative book project TOWN. Most recently, her poems may be found in the Third Annual Nâz?m Hikmet Festival chapbook. She has been a finalist for the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize and her work was selected for the Poetry at Noon series at the Library of Congress. Dianne is currently researching and writing about historical wild land fires in the American West. She works as a writer and editor for the Forest History Society.

David Need lives in Durham and teaches at Duke University. His poetry and criticism have appeared in Talisman, Hambone, Golden Handcuff Review, Oyster Boy, Minor American and Effing Press. He curates the Arcade Taberna Long Poem Reading Series and will be presenting a performance of his long poem "St. John's Rose Slumber" in Spring 2012 at Duke and DAC.

Description of presentation: Will be reading from "Goodnight Irene" a year-long writing project in honor of his mother's death in October 2010.

Her novel The Bruise won the 2008 Lambda Award for lesbian debut fiction. Currently she is working on a manuscript of poems called Dog is a Way of Thinking. She is a PhD candidate in Duke University's Department of English and a co-curator of the Minor American Reading Series in Durham, NC.

Allison Curseen writes poetry and fiction. She is an English PhD candidate at Duke and received her MFA in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC. In addition to teaching Creative Writing at Duke, Allison enjoys teaching writing courses to middle schoolers and in the prisons. Allison is particularly
interested in doing everything, saying everything, and the miracle of their always being room for one more at the table. Her life as a writer/academic/community participant are all of one thinking and breath

Description of presentation: "Places, Animals, and other Things that Run Away" Allison will be reading a mix of pieces, but mostly from the beginnings of a collection that focuses on the space where something once was and the constant moving of things still here.

Is an attorney who works with children and families. He lives on a farm in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife, horses, guineas, dogs, a cat and a cockatiel. He is the current poet laureate for Carrboro, North Carolina. For fifteen years he has coordinated poetry readings on Carrboro Day for the town's celebration of its residents and their gifts. He compiled and edited the Carrboro 100th Birthday Poetry Anthology, published in May 2011. In 1994 he published Haiku for Carroll. His poems have been published in Blink, they wrote us a poem VII and VIII (Health Arts Network at Duke), the Ecozoic Reader, the Legal Studies Forum, Haibun Today, and Cowboy Poetry.

Is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently, What It Takes, Turning Point Press, 2010. She won the North Carolina Writers' Network Chapbook contest for her first collection, Staying In. She is the founder and former director of the literary arts program for Health Arts Network at Duke University Medical Center and the founder of the Osler Literary Roundtable. She has taught poetry and creative writing at Duke University and North Carolina Central. She won an Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council in 2008. Her poems have been published in Kakalak, The Greensboro Review and Perigrine among others. She currently works for the Family Support Network in the Intensive Care Nursery at Duke.

Description of presentation: What It Takes: Poems on Birth and Mothering

She was born in Wales and grew up in a military family. She immigrated to the United States to study and, later, to teach and edit, and is now happily settled in Carrboro, North Carolina, where she works as a freelance copy editor and as a volunteer in the Fire Program of The Nature Conservancy's North Carolina Chapter. Her new poetry collection is titled The Many and the One.

Description of presentation: Will read from the manuscript of her collection The Many and the One, focusing on poems about controlled burning and the landscapes and communities Of North Carolina.

Is a writer, musician, and engineer living in Carrboro. He has led creative writing workshops locally and is a regular at area folk dances. His first book of poems, "The Swamps That Close", was released in 2004. He is currently working on a "fictional ethnomusicology" entitled "The Red Book of Tunes." This project documents "traditional" fiddle tunes and dances, and the history and stories of their passing from generation to generation. Tyler works in novel and short story forms, but poetry has always been his center.

Description of presentation: Tyler will read from his upcoming collection of poems penned by the Fiddler Poet Jericho McCleod.

Susan Willey Spalt retired several years ago after a full career in school health. A member of the OLLI Poetry Workshop and the North Carolina Poetry Society, she won honorable mention for the 2008 Joanne Catherine Scott Award for Poems in Traditional Forms. In addition, Carrboro Rocks, was put to music by Billy Sugerfix to celebrate Carrboro's one hundredth anniversary.

Description of presentation: Serendipity Laughs: A Selection of Poems in a Variety of Styles.

Joanna Catherine Scott is the author of the novels Child of the South; The Road from Chapel Hill; Cassandra, Lost; The Lucky Gourd Shop; and Charlie, the nonfiction Indochina's refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; and the prizewinning poetry collections Breakfast at the Shangri-la, Fainting at the Uffizi, and Night Huntress.

Is a freelance writer and poet in Durham. He reviews books and art shows for the Independent Weekly, writes passages for reading comprehension tests, and occasionally teaches creative writing in a variety of settings. His books include Nouns Swarm A Verb (Xurban, 1999), Irresponsibility (Ahsahta, 2008), and Obedience (Ahsahta, forthcoming in 2011). Father to two terrific daughters, he is also part of the artist collective at The Space at 715 Washington Street.

Laura Jaramillo is a poet from Queens, living in Durham, NC. She's the author of two chapbooks, The Reactionary Poems (Olywa Press) and Civilian Nest (Love Among the Ruins).

Description of presentation: I will be reading from my new long piece, Material Girl.

Is a longtime Triangle resident currently based in Durham. As a journalist, he edits Duke Performances blog The Thread and writes about music, books, andvarious culture for publications such as Pitchfork and The Independent Weekly. As a poet who also works in sound and video art, he has frequently published work in print and online journals-including Octopus, Effing, Fascicle, and many others-and in three chapbooks including (Guitar Smash from 3rdness Press and Foreign Letter from Beard of Bees). On the local poetry scene, he has helped judge the Independent's poetry contest for years, capriciously runs the Wax Wroth Reading Series, and gives readings himself in series such as Minor American and So-and-So.

Description of presentation: I will be showcasing poems from the manuscript I've been working on for the past several years, WOLF INTERVALS, which I have recently finished. In his introduction to a reading I gave a couple years ago, the poet Tony Tost offered what I think is an excellent description of WOLF INTERVALS: they "[race] through all the available registers of discourse to pin the emo that resides within the pomo against a wall until it finally owns up to all its rage."

Is a poet, new media artist and information scientist. 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Silliman recently wrote of Patrick's latest book, Be Somebody, "[l]ike somebody who understands that what makes Moby-Dick great is all that stuff about whales, Be Somebody is difficult in the way the very best books are." Patrick works at Duke University where he teaches new media studies and art, and develops text mining-based tools and research methods for interdisciplinary studies.

Sacrificial Poets will host a youth slam at 9:15pm in conjunction with the festival. Open for ages 13-19: 3 rounds with 3:30 time limit per poem. The winner will earn a spot in the 2012 Sacrificial Poets Grand Slam Finals.
Top three poets will also receive prizes.

If you would like to assist the Town of Carrboro in our effort to provide this Community Event- please use this paypal link or send your donation to:

Carrboro Recreation and Parks
Kim Andrews
100 North Greensboro Street
Carrboro, NC
27510

Checks should be made out to the Town of Carrboro and please note that this donation is to support our poetry endeavors.