Literary Café at CFI featuring Ralph Black and Joe Todaro

Ralph Black‘s poems have appeared in The Manchester Review (UK), Orion, The Carolina Quarterly, West Branch, Georgia, Gettysburg and Mid-American Reviews, among other journals. Black is the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review, the Chelsea Poetry Prize, and the 2017 Hopper Literary Magazine Poetry Prize. Black’s most recent book, Bloom and Laceration, was published this year by Green Writer Press of Vermont. His full-length collection, Turning Over the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions. (“With nods to Brahms and Haydn, Pablo Neruda, Theodore Roethke, and Christopher Smart, Ralph Black’s poems tell of a passion for being in the world, a desire to make meaningful contact with the sensuous, both natural and human, while exploring the territory of longing and loss, love and family, wild land and city street.”) His chapbook, The Apple Psalms, is from Paper Lantern Press. He teaches at SUNY Brockport, where he is also Co-Director of the Brockport Writers Forum. In 2010, Dr. Black was the featured reader for the Burchfield Penney Art Center Poetry Series. He read for The Gray Hair Series in Buffalo in 2011 and was the 2012 Elizabeth McNulty Wilkinson Poet at Buffalo Seminary.  In 2015, he was a participant in the Halki Summit II in Turkey, along with several prominent speakers from various disciplines and countries, including Terry Tempest Williams.        

Joe Todaro is a writer and musician. He was co-producer, with Celia White, of the Urban Epiphany poetry marathons and producer of the Classics on Elmwood recital series, between 1998 and 2012.