Author Da Chen

Saturday, August 7, 2:00 p.m.

New York Times best selling novelist, memoirist, children's book author & speaker. Da Chen grew up in the deep south of China, running barefoot in muddy fields and riding the backs of water buffaloes. In his tiny Fujian village, water was fetched from an ancient well swimming with snakes, and the only lights that burned in most households were hissing kerosene lanterns. As the grandson of a disgraced landowner, he was a victim of communist political persecution and hollowing poverty during the Cultural Revolution. His family was beaten, his father thrown in reform camp, and young Chen, at the age of nine, was threatened with imprisonment. Unfailing family love helped him survive in a dysfunctional society and he found unexpected love and friendship with four other hoodlum outcasts, but dreams made him soar above the poverty and persecution. His first encounter with a Christian woman, a Baptist professor, was life changing. She taught him English and opened the possibility of another world. He excelled in college at Beijing Languages and Culture University, and stayed on as a professor of English after graduating top in his class. Da arrived in America at the age of 23 with $30 in his pocket, a bamboo flute, and a heart filled with hope. He attended Columbia University School of Law on a full scholarship, and upon graduating, worked for the Wall Street investment banking firm of Rothschilds, Inc.

His books are used as textbooks in Yale, Vassar, Wellesley, in the New York State University system, and in high schools and middle schools throughout the country. He lives in upstate New York with his family. The talk at HOH is free and open to families of all ages.

Poetry Reading
Lee Gould
Stuart Bartow
Barbara Louise Ungar

Saturday, October 10, 2:00 p.m.

Stuart Bartow is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Whelk (Pgymy Forest Press, 2001) and Reasons to Hate the Sky (WordTech, 2008), as well as four chapbooks, including The Stars Belong to No One, winner of the Owl Creek Chapbook Prize (1994) and The Perseids, winner of the Palanquin Prize from the University of South Carolina (1997). This year his poem, "Shinto," won the California State Poetry Society's annual poetry contest. He has published innumerable poems in various journals, and is a seasoned reader; he can be heard bimonthly on WAMC's Vox Pop poetry show, reading work of his own and others. He is professor of English at Adirondack Community College in upstate New York, where he teaches British and World Literature.

Lee Gould will be reading from her new chapbook Weeds from Finishing Line Press. Marie Ponsot calls Gould's poems "radically lively" catching "both reality and the wildness under it..." while Peg Boyers refers to Gould's "vibrant, accessible often darkly funny free verse."
After teaching at Goucher College, Lee retired to the Hudson Valley where she continues to teach, write poems and reviews, gardens, makes far too much jam and explores the marvels of Columbia County and Hudson where she serves on the Democratic Party Committee. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Quarterly West, The Gay and Lesbian Review, the Berkshire Review, Chronogram, Magma, Phoebe, Passager, Women and the Environment and other journals.

Barbara Louise Ungar's most recent poetry collection, Charlotte Bronte, You Ruined My Life, was a 2009 finalist for the National Poetry Series and Sarabande Books' Morton Prize. Her last book, The Origin of the Milky Way, won the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award, the Adirondack Center for Writing Award for Best Book of Poetry 2007 (co-winner), a silver Independent Publishers Book Award, and an Eric Hoffer Notable for Poetry Award. She is also the author of Thrift (WordTech Editions 2005), and the chapbooks Sequel (Finishing Line Press 2004) and Neoclassical Barbra (Angel Fish Press 1998), as well as the monograph Haiku In English (Stanford 1978, reprinted in Simply Haiku 2007-9). A professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.