VALA GALLERY

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7388152538

Les Epstein

Les Epstein is a poet, playwright, librettist, stage director and educator. Epstein’s books include Sleep Cinematic: A Golem’s Quartet (Gnashing Teeth), Kip Divided (Finishing Line) and Lorenzo by the Ghost Light (Gnashing Teeth). Gnashing Teeth will release his new book, Teddy Orloff and the Three Onions in February 2024. Recent credits include Slant, Empyrean, Otherwise Engaged, Clinch Mountain Review, and Jelly Bucket as well as the anthologies Heat the Grease (Gnashing Teeth Publishing), Pain & Renewal (Vita Brevis Press) and Ohio Bards Poetry Anthology (Local Gems Press). 

His produced plays and libretti include the award-winning children’s opera, Barefoot (1997) and the folk opera, “Miss Lucy,” which premiered in 2011.  Two plays—“Ruby Plumb” and “Dinner with the Hornblatts,” premiered at the Belfast Maskers Theatre (Maine)—are available through Green Room Press, and his collaboration with Claudia de Franko, Llorona of the River, is available through Silver Birchington Plays.  Other works staged include “The Window Washer’s Wuhan” (Oregon’s Astor Street Opry), “Ira’s Fantastical Ride up New York 9” (West Virginia’s Greenbrier Valley Theater), “Possum Blossom” (Roy Arias Theatre, NYC), and “This Slud Zarilla” (Virginia’s Page to Stage). In 2018, Cyberwit Publishers released six short plays and the “Miss Lucy” libretto as a collection called Seven.  Les holds BA in Theatre and English from Otterbein College, a master’s degree from Miami University and continued his studies at New York University and The Ohio State University (in theater education).  He completed his teacher training at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia. 

He teaches theater and Humanities at the Community High School of Arts & Academics in Roanoke, VA, for which has staged more than 40 productions. 

Shelley Chernin
Wednesday, August 14, 2024
7-9 PM CST
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89307623707

He teaches writing in Paris.




Macha Greenleaf-Maple
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
7-9 PM CST
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84710818562

Macha Greenleaf-Maple, MSW, believes poetry, like song, is a way to main-line one another’s emotions. She believes expression is what helps us stay alive in the most difficult parts of our lives, and would add to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that the need to express ourselves to and with others is basic—like shelter and touch—and helps alleviate suffering no matter how grim.

Macha has degrees in psychology, women’s studies, and social work, which helped her frame an understanding for her decades of work with people in crisis, particularly women and children in homeless situations. Poetry, art, music, dogs, and humans who offered compassion have helped her heal things from childhood that needed healing, to choose to stay alive—clean and sober, to celebrate loving whomever and however she loves, and to believe in the power of sharing what she’s gathered in life so far. Macha lives with her poet/artist husband, John, and their good big dog Bodhi in Independence, Missouri.

Linda Wlodyka
Wednesday

Linda Bratcher Wlodyka is the Massachusetts, Beat Poet Laureate, 2023-2025. In the summer of 2023, Linda was chosen as a contributor to WordxWord a summer poetry festival in the Berkshires where she collaborated with a team of poets creating a very large poem that was read aloud for the audience at The Mount. She also has held the position as a docent at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s summer home in Lenox, MA from 2002 -2006. She retired as an educator from Mt. Greylock Regional School District in Williamstown in 2020. Linda’s poem, Secret Cottage, was voted Best in the Berkshires in 2012 and she was invited to the Colonial Theater in Pittsfield, MA to read that poem.

Linda also has had three poems published in Red Barn Volume I, in 2016 after attending Peter Bergman's workshop at Arrowhead the historic homestead of author Herman Melville in Pittsfield, MA.  Linda has 3 chapbooks previously self-published, Her Spirited Cameo, Voices from the Blue Room and Tick Tock. If Brambles Were Bookends Collected Poems, is Linda’s first full length poetry collection released September 2023. Her poems have been widely anthologized throughout the United States. She is a member of the Florence Poet’s Society and has recently been involved reading and choosing poems for publication in the anthologies, Silkworm and Naugatuck River Review.