Barrington Public Library's Rhody Radio

His radio show The Soul Serenade, featuring classic soul music from the 1960s and 1970s, airs on WICN on Mondays at 7 pm.

His film with Norm Grant Do It, Man! The Story of The Celebrity Club tells the story of Providence's legendary Celebrity Club in the African-American neighborhood Randall Square and owned by Italian-American Paul Filippi.

His book with Dennis Pratt A Treasury of Rhode Island Jazz & Swing Musicians is a biographical collection of jazz and swing musicians who have played in Rhode Island and a sequel to Who's Who in Rhode Island Jazz: c. 1925-1988 by Rhode Island musicians and historians Lloyd Kaplan and Robert Petteruti.

In today’s episode we are headed outside to set up a StoryWalk® at Sowams Woods, a property managed by the Barrington Land Conservation Trust. We will also hear from a few board members of the Trust to learn a bit about what they do to conserve open space in town and how you can enjoy a land trust property near you. Discover your RI land trust through the RI Land Trust Council's website.

A StoryWalk® is an innovative way to enjoy reading and the outdoors at the same time. Laminated pages from a children's book are attached to signposts along this one-mile loop trail where you can walk along this woodland path and read The Belonging Tree by Maryann Cocca-Leffler.

StoryWalks® were created in 2007 by Anne Ferguson in Montpelier, Vermont and have been installed in all 50 states and 12 countries.

Learn more about our StoryWalk® at Sowams Woods in Barrington, which is happening 10/9/20 to 10/30/20.

Register for our Outdoor Scavenger Hunt at Barrington Public Library on 10/27/20 at 4 pm.

Reading Recommendations about the natural world from out BLCT guests include:

Melissa’s Pick:

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Victor’s Picks:

Night of the Spadefoot Toads by Bill Harley ; The Overstory by Richard Powers (Cindy also recommended!) ; The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau ; A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold ; and any of John Muir’s writings

Cindy's Picks:

Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush (Victor also recommended!) ; Casting Deep Shade by C.D. Wright

This episode is a special bonus episode to our earlier interview with  the 2020 Reading Across Rhode Island author Elizabeth Rush of Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore.

What you are about to hear is a reading by Elizabeth of the opening  chapter of Rising titled The Password. In addition, we have a second  bonus episode recorded by Cranston Public Library and Living Literature,  a Rhode Island based collective of artists and educators performing  Rising in the form of readers theatre. You can find the author interview  and the episode featuring Living Literature’s performance of Rising in your podcast feed if you are subscribed to Rhody Radio. They were both released on 9/15/2020 (episodes 5  & 7). Or go to rhodyradio.org.

In August 2020 we interviewed Elizabeth Rush about her book Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore which was selected for the 2020 Reading Across Rhode Island book for a one state one read.

Book Recommendations from Elizabeth Rush:

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains by Kerri Arsenault

Getting Involved with Climate Activism:

Surging Seas mapping tools

Anthropocene Alliance & Higher Ground flood survivor network

Nationalize Grid

Sunrise Movement 

This episode was originally planned as a live in-person event on  March 12, 2020. It was canceled due to COVID-19. You can learn about the  original partner organizations that were working with the library to  bring Elizabeth Rush to Barrington.

Barrington Land Conservation Trust 

Change for the Better 

Friends of Barrington Public Library 

Ink Fish Books

Reading Across Rhode Island & Center for the Book 

• Naomi Shihab Nye - contemporary American poet
• Joy Harjo - contemporary Muscogee (Creek) poet, playwright, and musician who was appointed US poet laureate in 2019
• Li-Young Lee - contemporary Chinese-American poet. Kara loves his poem "Word for Worry" from Book of My Nights.
• Kay Ryan: former US poet laureate and LGBTQ writer
• Ocean Vuong - young gay Vietnamese-American poet and novelist whose most recent book is Night Sky with Exit Wounds
• Tracy K. Smith - contemporary African American poet and another former US poet laureate whose most recent book is Life on Mars
• Rigoberto Gonzales - contemporary gay Latino poet 
• Quincy Troupe - African American poet influenced by jazz and blues and is a great reader of his work
• Phil Levine - working-class poet from Detroit
• Mark Doty - contemporary gay poet whose poems range from humorous to lyrical to intensely emotional
• Mary Oliver - writes about the natural world and animals and lived for many years on Cape Cod
• Dorianne Laux - contemporary American poet who grew up in Maine
• Lucille Clifton - African American poet from New York who is also a wonderful reader of her work
• Jericho Brown - contemporary African American LGBTQ poet from Louisiana whose book The Tradition won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for poetry
• Tina Chang - contemporary Chinese-American poet who was named the first women poet laureate of Brooklyn in 2010
• Claudia Rankine - contemporary African American author whose recent work Citizen is a series of prose poems exploring race in America
• Bob Hicok and Billy Collins are two of Kara's favorite writers who often use humor to get a serious subject in their poems
• Andrea Gibson - contemporary American lesbian poet who is big on the spoken word scene
• Sign up for Poem-A-Day in your inbox by the Academy of American Poets 
• Poetry Dose podcast by RI poet laureate Tina Cane, features interviews, discussions, and readings of poetry by current writes, often with a RI connection

Kara Provost has published two chapbooks, Topless (Main Street Rag, 2011) and Nests (Finishing Line Press, 2006), in addition to six microchapbooks with the Origami Poems project (origamipoems.com). Her poems have appeared in the Skinny Poetry Journal, Connecticut Review, Ocean State Review, Main Street Rag, The Newport Review, Ibbetson Street, New Verse News, and other journals. Kara’s work can also be found in a number of anthologies, including Credo: Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing (Cambridge Writers’ Workshop 2018); Nuclear Impact: Shattered Atoms in Our Hands (Shabda Press 2017); Shifts: Women’s Growth through Change (MuseWrite Press 2016); the Wickford Art Association 2013 exhibit catalog, Poetry and Art; Lay Bare the Canvas: New England Poets on Art; and In Praise of Pedagogy: Poetry, Flash Fiction, and Essays on Composing, edited by David Starkey and Wendy Bishop.