Sam Cornish Award recipient Gloria Mindock.— Photo by Paul Miller

On Sunday, August 11, Somerville Poet Gloria Mindock was honored with the Sam Cornish Award at the Longfellow House, Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge.

It goes without saying that not everyone gets their way when election time rolls around. There are winners and losers, the satisfied and the disgruntled. As passionately as we may feel about our pet issues of interest, the inevitable day comes when our convictions are put to the test and the results are set in stone, for better or worse, depending on which side you are standing on.

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Interview by Doug Holder/ New England Poetry Club – Board of Directors

Recently, I was out in Amesbury, Ma. for a memorial reading for the late Poet Laureate of Amesbury, Lainie Senechal. The reading was on the grounds of the Whittier House. There I met poet Lisa Usani Phillips, the current Poet Laureate, and she told me she has a new book of poetry out titled Guest People (Wheeling Tern, 2022). She generously agreed to this interview.

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Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher and psychotherapist. His first book titled, Having Listened, won the 2013 Homebound Publications Poetry Contest. In 2014 it received a Benjamin Franklin Silver Book Award, and in 2015 was translated into Russian and a bilingual edition was published.  His new book, Being, There, includes new poems along with his translation of the ancient Greek fragments of Parmenides from the 5th century BCE. This book dances between the poetic voice of Parmenides and the poetic remembrances of a young life on a prairie cattle ranch. His poems have appeared in journals, including Salamander, Plainsongs, The Aurorean, Atlanta Review, Comstock Review, The Wayfarer, Poetry Daily, The Red Letters and Kasparhauser.

David Bogen (far left), Berklee interim president and provost; Boston city councilor Sharon Durkin; and Krystal Prime Banfield (far right), Berklee vice president of education outreach and social entrepreneurship, celebrated this year’s City Music scholarship recipients on stage at the Berklee Performance Center. Image by Elizabeth Friar

Ronald Ellies of Somerville is one of nine recipients of four-year, full-tuition Berklee City Music Scholarships this year. He is a current participant in Berklee City Music programming, focusing on drum performance. He plans to major in Music Production and Performance at Berklee. 

Somerville Public Schools ($41,035)is the recipient of a computer science education grant from the Healey-Driscoll Administration

Following the Healey-Driscoll Administration’s STEM Summit focused on computer science education and careers, the administration announced  that it is awarding $265,025 in grants to nine school districts to establish and promote rigorous, engaging and standards-aligned digital literacy and computer science education. These funds are designed to support implementation that began last year for either grades 3-5 or grades 6-8. The grant will help districts expand digital literacy and computer science education into an adjacent grade span, with a focus on ensuring that all students in that grade are receiving computer science education.

This is the largest Brazilian cultural event in New England, and is organized by the community for the community with a lot of help from volunteers. This year, the festivities will be held from September 3rd to the 8th, and there will be plenty of activity. Massachusetts is home to one of the largest and most organized Brazilian communities in the United States.