Watershed Literary Events Poetry Reading June 1

Watershed Literary Events will host writer and educator Peter Murphy and friends Joel Dias-Porter, Karen Z Duffy, and Moneeba Khan on Sunday, June 1, at 3 pm. The event will be held in the Stage and Screen Room of the Baird Community Center, located at 5 Mead St. in South Orange. Watershed is sponsored by the Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs and the Meadowland Park Conservancy in South Orange. Admission is free, and the venue is accessible to all.

Peter E. Murphy is the founder of Murphy Writing of Stockton University. Since 1994, the program has hosted thousands of established and beginning writers in workshops in the U.S. and Europe. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City, where he operated heavy equipment, managed a nightclub, and drove a taxi. His most recent books are A Tipsy Fairy Tale: A Coming of Age Memoir of Alcohol and Redemption and You Too Were Once on Fire, a collection of poems coming from Terrapin Books in September. Earlier works include the collection Stubborn Child (Jane Street Press, 2005) and several chapbooks. Murphy has received fellowships for writing and teaching from The Folger Shakespeare Library, The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

Joel Dias-Porter, aka DJ Reneg8d, was born and raised in Pittsburgh. A five-time Individual Finalist in the National Poetry Slam, and two-time Haiku Slam Champion, his poems have been published in Time Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Best American Poetry 2014, Mead, POETRY, Callaloo, and Ploughshares, among many other journals. Dias-Porter’s poetry collection Ideas of Improvisation, which Jericho Brown called “a debut like no other,” was published by Thread Makes Blanket Press in 2022. A Cave Canem fellow, Dias-Porter won the Furious Flower Emerging Poet Award in 1995. He has performed on the Today Show, SlamNation, BET, and in the film Slam.

Karen Z Duffy is a poet and memoirist whose chapbook, Giving in to the Smoke, received the Starting Gate Award from Finishing Line Press. She has won two fellowships in poetry, one from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and one in Creative Nonfiction from the Norman Mailer Colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She is retired from teaching English at Atlantic City High School, and lives, along with a lot of other people, on a barrier island that is slowly disappearing, though nobody talks about it. Besides writing, Duffy enjoys reading on the beach and playing with her numerous grandchildren.

Moneeba Khan was born in Pakistan and immigrated to the U.S. with her family in her early childhood. She grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and is a graduate of Stockton University where she received a B.A. in Biology with a minor in Writing. Khan has been writing poetry throughout her life and aspires to publish her own book of poetry in the near future.

Now in its seventh year of programming, Watershed Literary Events promotes the work of a talented and diverse array of writers with a New Jersey connection. For more information contact Blake Smith at arts@southorange.org.