Watershed Literary Events Poetry Reading March 9

Watershed Literary Events will celebrate Women’s History Month with a reading featuring award-winning writers Claudia Cortese, Isabel Cruz, and Susanna Rich. The event will take place on Sunday, March 9, at the South Orange Skate House. Watershed is sponsored by the Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs and the Meadowland Park Conservancy in South Orange. The event is free and open to the public.

Claudia Cortese, a queer poet, essayist, and fiction writer, is a 2023 recipient of a NJ State Council for the Arts grant. Their debut poetry collection, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press), won Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Award for Emerging Poetry. Cortese has also published two chapbooks: Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press) and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press) and has been published widely in journals such as Blackbird, Gulf Coast, and The Kenyon Review. The child of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio and lives in New Jersey. They teach at Montclair State University in the Department of Writing Studies, the Creative Writing Program, and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program.

Isabel Cruz is a Puerto Rican poet. She received her B.A in American Studies and Creative Writing with a Poetry Concentration from Smith College. She has been published in The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press Books 2023 Summer Edition and is a reader for The Massachusetts Review. Recent honors include selection as a 2024 Featured Poet for the Dodge Poetry Festival, the 2023 Eleanor Cederstrom Prize, the 2024 Five College Prose and Poetry Prize, and the 2024 Elizabeth Babcock Prize for Best Poem. Since 2023, she has served as the Inaugural Youth Poetry Ambassador for the Paterson Poetry Festival.

Susanna Rich’s most recent collections are Beware the House (The Poet’s Press, 2019) and Shout: Poetry for Suffrage (Blast Press, 2020), a collection of poems and dramatic dialogues from the perspective of the movement’s leading figures. Other collections include Surfing for Jesus, The Drive Home, and Television Daddy. As founding producer of Wild Nights Productions, LLC, Rich tours her musical Shakespeare’s *itches: The Women v. Will, and one-woman performances of her poetry collections. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her poetry, is a Fulbright Fellow, and received the Presidential Excellence Award in Distinguished Teaching at Kean University.

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.