Aug. 8: ELIZABETH THOMAS
Aug. 15: RAVI SHANKAR
Aug. 22: NGOMA
Aug. 29: CHARLES RAFFERTY

Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein and Managing Director Michael Stotts are proud to announce a new four-part series of poetry readings, "GHOSTLIGHT: Poetry for a Dark Stage," at Long Wharf Theatre in August.

"GHOSTLIGHT: Poetry for a Dark Stage" celebrates the region's leading poets and spoken word artists.

Original work will be presented every Monday evening in August by Elizabeth Thomas (Aug. 8), Ravi Shankar (Aug. 15), Ngoma (Aug. 22), and Charles Rafferty (Aug. 29).

Following a question and answer session with the featured artist, the stage will be set for the audience to share a favorite poem or original work in an open mic format.

Doors open at 7 p.m. with opening performances beginning at 7:30 p.m. in Long Wharf Theatre's rehearsal hall, located above Stage II (222 Sargent Drive, off exit 46 on I-95).

General admission tickets are $5 and student tickets are $3 with ID. There is plenty of free parking in our lot. Click here for directions and theatre information.

Tickets can be purchased at the door only so plan on arriving early to register for open mic and guarantee your admission!

ARTIST BIOS

ELIZABETH THOMAS
Elizabeth Thomas is a published poet who designs and teaches writing programs at schools and organizations throughout the U.S. These programs promote literacy and the power of both written and spoken word.

An outstanding advocate of youth in the arts, she started UpWords Poetry, an organization dedicated to promoting programs for young writers. She is an organizer and coach of the CT National Youth Poetry Slam team and hosts a website at www.upwordspoetry.com. She will be joined Aug. 8 by some of the young poets she has worked and traveled with.

RAVI SHANKAR
Ravi Shankar is poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the internationally acclaimed online journal of the arts, www.drunkenboat.com.

His first book, Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in May 2004. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in such places as The Paris Review, Poets & Writers, Time Out New York, The New Hampshire Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, Caketrain, Fourth River, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, The Paris/Atlantic, Ecopoetics, The Indiana Review, The Electronic Book Review, Western Humanities Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer's Chronicle, among other publications, including two anthologies of contemporary poetry.

He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in poetry. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, the Asia Society, Artspace, University of Virginia, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and the Cornelia Street Cafe, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Shankar also has served on panels at UCLA, Poet's House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore and Vancouver, been a commentator for NPR, KKUP and Wesleyan radio and been featured in the Hartford Courant, The Journal Messenger and in the Shoreline Press.

He reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an interview with him at: http://jacketmagazine.com/16/dev-iv-shank.html.

As a youth, he was once forced to conjure silken scarves from an empty hat as a magician's apprentice for his father, Sam the Super.

NGOMA
Ngoma is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter and paradigm shifter, who for over 30 years has used culture as a tool to raise sociopolitical and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought.

A former member of the Spirit House Movers and Players with Amiri Baraka and the Contemporary Freedom Song Duo, Serious Bizness, Ngoma weaves poetry and song that raises contradictions and searches for a solution for a just and peaceful world.

Ngoma was the Prop Slam winner of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Competition in Middletown, CT, and was published in African Voices Magazine, Long Shot Anthology, The Underwood Review, Signifyin' Harlem Review and 'Bum Rush the Page/Def Poetry Jam Anthology. He was featured in the PBS Spoken Word Documentary, "The Apro-Poets" with Allen Ginsberg.

Ngoma has hosted the slam at the Dr. Martin Luther King Festival of Social and Environmental Justice Festival (Yale University) for the past 9 years. His newest CD release, "Ngoma's Take Out (Smokin' Spoken Word Cuisine w/Jazz-Funk-Fusion)" and his CD Movie Documentary "Ngoma:Alive and In Your Face from NYC," takes Jazz/Funk/Fusion and the Spoken Word to the next level.

His CDs "Didgitation: Solo Didgeridoo Musik for Meditation" and "Ancient Future Meditational Musik" are must haves for those interested in altered states of consciousness.

CHARLES RAFFERTY
Charles Rafferty's book The Man on the Tower was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1995 after winning the Arkansas Poetry Award, and Where the Glories of April Lead was published by Mitki/Mitki Press in 2001.

His latest book, During the Beauty Shortage, has just been released by M2 Press. In addition, Charles Rafferty's poems have appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Underwood Review, Quarterly West, Washington Square, Connecticut River Review, Louisiana Literature, The Laurel Review, Poetry East, and Connecticut Review, as well as in American Poetry: The Next Generation, an anthology published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

He has received the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, the Brodine/Brodinsky Poetry Prize, and a grant from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He currently works as an editor for a technology consulting firm.

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