Catherine Morrocco and Molly Lynn Watt

Catherine Morocco’s recently published book, Moon without Craters or Shadows(Aldrich 2014) documents her recovery from brain injury caused by a brain hematoma. The book draws on memory, hallucination, interviews with family members, and fragments of a journal she kept between surgeries and comatose periods. “Son’s Story” from that volume won the Dana Foundation Prize for poetry related to the brain.

Catherine’s poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Salamander, CALYX: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, Concrete Wolf, and in the collections, Island Voices2 (2014) and Unlocking the Poem (Riccio and Siegel (2009).  She is the author of two books on teaching for content understanding with adolescents, Visionary Middle Schools (Teachers College Press, 2006) and Supported Adolescent Literacy (Jossey-Bass, 2008).  She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

“We share the poet’s journey, from her remarkable first notes when in intensive care to the fragile blessing of recovery. Moon without Craters or Shadows sizzles with perception, imagery and vision; it is a life-changing book.” Andrew James Cole, M.D. Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School writes, “These poems translate the experience of being a patient with a serious illness into words, images and metaphors that allow the reader to share the experience at both a cognitive and emotional level.”

– Kathleen Spivack

Molly Lynn Watt will be reading from her most recent book, On Wings of Song-A Journey into the Civil Rights Era, Ibbetson Street 2014, a memoir in poems of her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement with her husband and two young daughters. The workcamp volunteers included 15 black activists from Birmingham and 15 primarily white volunteers from the north. In the middle of the night the group were rousted at gun point by men dressed in denim, not to be lynched as she feared, but driven to the Maryville Jail and thrown into the drunk tank. This is an American story where the personal meets the political. The books starts during World War II and concludes in 2014.