September 24 7pm

Mariela Griffor: A native of Chile, Griffor was forced to flee the
regime of Augusto Pinochet after the murder of her fiancé by agents of
the dictator and threats against her own life. She spent 12 years in
Sweden, where she met her husband, Edward Griffor, a native Detroiter
and world-renowned mathematician. In 1998 the couple moved to Grosse
Pointe Park, where they live with their two daughters. Griffor earned
a bachelor's degree in journalism and a certificate in Montessori
education, and is completing a master's degree in Media Studies at
Wayne State University. She is a co-founder of the Detroit Institute
for Creative Writers at Wayne State University, where she also served
as Detroit Urban Woman Writer in Residence in 2003. She is curator of
the Poets Follies reading series at the Grosse Pointe Artists
Association. She is the author of House (Mayapple Press, 2007).

Judith Kerman has published eight books or chapbooks of poetry, most
recently Galvanic Response (March Street Press, 2005); the bilingual
collection, Plane Surfaces/Plano de Incidencia (Santo Domingo: CCLEH,
2002), with Spanish translations by Johnny Durán; and two books of
translations of poetry, Praises & Offenses: Three Women Poets from the
Dominican Republic (BOA Editions, 2009) and A Woman in Her Garden:
Selected Poems of Dulce María Loynaz (White Pine Press, 2002). Kerman
was a Fulbright Senior Scholar to the Dominican Republic in 2002. She
runs Mayapple Press (1980-present) and was founding editor of Earth’s
Daughters (1971 to present). She is the founder/coordinator of the
Rustbelt Roethke Professional Writers’ Retreat (2003-present).

John Palen is a Michigan poet, fiction writer, journalist and teacher.
He has published two books with Mayapple Press, Staying Intact, a
chapbook, in 1997, and Open Communion: New and Selected Poems, in
2005. His most recent collections, both poetry chapbooks, are Drizzle
and Plum Blossoms, translations from the Chinese with Li C. Tien,
published by March Street Press, and Harry Truman All the Way, from
Pudding House. His short fiction has been published in Symbolon. Palen
retired in 2009 as professor of journalism at Central Michigan
University. He continues to teach as an adjuct English instructor at
Delta College, and serves on the board of director of the Midland Area
League of Women Voters. Palen also writes about literature and the
arts in the Saginaw River watershed at his blog, Three-Eyed Fish,
http://japalen.wordpress.com/. He and his wife, cellist Lois Palen,
live in Midland.