Earth's Daughters presents the Gray Hair Series Finale, featuring a dozen local writers (including the members of the Earth's Daughters collective) who have graced the stage for the series over the past 10 years. The featured readers are Ansie Baird, Kastle Brill, Jennifer Campbell, Ann Goldsmith, Jorge Guitart, Olga Karman, Joyce Kessel, David Landrey, Peter Siedlecki, Carole Southwood, Janna Willoughby-Lohr, and ryki zuckerman.

This event is co-sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center. Admission is $10 in support of publication of Earth's Daughters magazine, now in its 45th year.

We will be thinking of Bill Sylvester, Sally Fiedler, Jimmie Gilliam, Gabrielle Burton, Norma Kassirer, Joy Walsh, and Manny Fried, who all read in the series during its decade-long run, and are all sorely missed, as well as late Earth's Daughters editors Robin Willoughby and Bonnie Johnson.

Ansie Baird teaches at The Buffalo Seminary, is a former editor for Earth's Daughters, has taught for Just Buffalo in their Writers In Education program, and participated in the Albright-Knox collaborative entitled: A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review, The Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The South Dakota Review, The Quarterly, The Recorder, Earth's Daughters, and other journals. In addition, her work has been included in The Paris Review 50th Anniversary anthology from Fall 2003 and several more recent anthologies, such as Four Buffalo Poets (Outrider Poetry Project, 2016). Her book, In Advance Of All Parting, won the White Pine Press national poetry competition and was published by White Pine Press in 2009. In September, 2016, her second full-length collection of poems, The Solace of Islands, is being published by BlazeVOX Press. Ann Goldsmith is the author of a full-length book of poetry, The Spaces Between Us (Outrider Poetry Project, 2010) and No One Is the Same Again, a prize-winning book of poems published by the Quarterly Review of Literature. Her most recent publication is in the anthology Four Buffalo Poets (Outrider Poetry Project, 2016). Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Traffic East and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry. She won the 2002 St. Louis Poetry Center's Best Poem Contest, was a runner-up in the 1996 Orillia International Poetry Festival, twice a finalist in the "Discovery"/The Nation national poetry competition, winner of a WNY Writers-in-Residence Award in 1984, and one of "Five New Voices" selected in the Second Biennial Burchfield Competition in 1983. In 1985-86 she served on the poetry panel for the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

A graduate of Smith College, Goldsmith holds a MA from the University of Denver and a Ph.D. from UB, where she taught for 10 years. She has also taught humanities at Trocaire College and creative writing at D'Youville College. Previous to that, she worked as a newspaper reporter in her hometown of Schenectady, NY, before moving to Boulder, CO, (where she was married and widowed) and as a librarian in the Denver Public Library. She taught very popular poetry workshops for a number of years for Buffalo's C. G. Jung Center. Jorge Guitart, born in Cuba, holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Georgetown University and is Professor of Spanish linguistics in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo. He has published widely in his field. As a poet he writes both in his native Spanish and in English, endeavoring to keep them schizophrenically apart. In his most recent work he is aiming hard at the comic and the satirical. His favorite genre is parody. He is the author of Foreigner's Notebook (Shuffaloff Press, 1993) Film Blanc (Meow Press, 1996), and The Empress of Frozen Custard and Ninety-Nine Other Poems (BlazeVOX, 2009). He is represented in the Electronic Poetry Center at UB. He has translated Cuban poets into English, (e.g., Jose Kozer) and U.S. poets into Spanish (e.g., John Ashbery). In the last few years he has collaborated with artists, in other fields, including the painter Catherine Parker, the Lake Affect musical group, and the photographer Errol Daniels. He is also a painter and songwriter. He participated in the Cuban-American Artists from Western New York exhibit at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center in 2005, and had a solo show at Buffalo's El Museo in 2006. His tango "Si supieras" was recorded by singer Elise Witt and is included in her 2003 CD Love Being Here. David Landrey is Professor Emeritus of Literature at State University College at Buffalo. He spent 38 years teaching literature, 35 of them at Buffalo State College, where he developed courses in American Postmodern Poets. He studied briefly with Charles Olson at SUNY Buffalo. He is the author of two chapbooks, Consciousness Suite (Spuyten Duyvil Books, 2009) and Intermezzi to Divorce Poems and Dinner Table Scenes and is anthologized in Four Buffalo Poets (Outrider Poetry Project, 2016). Landrey is the co-editor of Drawing From Life: A Selection of Joel Oppenheimer's Work From the Village Voice and of Oppenheimer's Poetry: The Ecology of the Soul. He has had essays published on William Bronk (in a collection from Talisman House) and on Robert Creeley and Joel Oppenheimer (in The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in Our Time from Talisman House). A former Fulbright lecturer in Turkey, he is known for the "masterful clarity and precision" with which he writes. Professor, community activist, poet, and memoirist, Olga Karman is the author Scatter My Ashes over Havana and of two poetry chapbooks, Adiós and Border Crossing. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories. Olga was born in Havana, but left Cuba in 1960, two years after the triumph of the Revolution and just months after the night she and a handful of fellow university students had stopped Fidel Castro's car on a remote country bridge and pleaded that he not close their Catholic university. He was all ears. Olga attended Connecticut College and Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. in Latin American literature. After moving to Buffalo, she taught at Nichols School before joining the D'Youville College faculty, where she taught for almost 3 decades before retiring. During that time she became a Hispanic community activist. One of her poems is set in tile on the wall of the Allen Street station of Buffalo's light rail system. Peter Siedlecki is Professor Emeritus in English and American literature and Poet in Residence at Daemen College. He is director of the Readings at the RIC series and author of the recently published collection, Going With The Flow. A three-time Fulbright Senior Lecturer in American Literature in Krakow, Poland, and the former German Democratic Republic, he is also the author of Voyeur: Poems (BlazeVox Books). Carole Southwood teaches writing and literature at SUNY Empire State College. She studied with Carl Dennis, Raymond Federman, and the late Mac Hammond. She studied in the Writer's Program at the University of Iowa with Marvin Bell and the late Ted Berrigan. In 2007, Carole published her first novel, Call Me Shady. She co-hosts a literary series at Empire State College. Kastle Brill is a poet, memoirist, fiction writer, artist, and editor, who has out two chapbooks: One Night Stands & Other Pieces of Time and The Head. She is anthologized in Celebrating Western New York Poets (White Buffalo Publications, 2015). Her poems have appeared in White Pine Journal, Black Mountain II Review, Serendipity Arts, Poetry on the Bus, and Earth's Daughters. She is also a retired environmental lawyer and an active and passionate tai chi teacher. Jennifer Campbell is a Professor of English at Erie County Community College/North. In addition to being a current co-editor of Earth's Daughters, she was also previously co-editor of Beyond Bones. Her first book of poetry, titled Driving Straight Through, was published by FootHills in 2008. In 2013, Saddle Road Press published her collection, Supposed to Love. Her work has appeared in many small press publications, including Saranac Review, Fugue, The Pedestal, New Millennium Writings, Eclipse, Slipstream, and Slant, Sow's Ear, and CHEST. Campbell is anthologized in Celebrating Western New York Poets (White Buffalo Publications, 2015). She is the curator of the Center for Inquiry Literary Cafe Series. Joyce Kessel teaches literature, writing, and interdisciplinary courses at Villa Maria College. Her chapbook, Describing the Dark, was published in 2013 in the Forty-Three North Chapbook Series from Saddle Road Press and Classroom Quixote,from Writer's Den, was released in 2015. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Celebrating Western New York Poets (White Buffalo Publications, 2015), Waging Words for Peace (Niagara River Press, 2004), and three from Kind of a Hurricane Press — A Touch of Saccharine (2014), Point Mass (2013), and Backlit Barbie (2012). Her work has also appeared on WNY Metro buses through Swift Kick, and in Black Mountain II Review, Pure Light, Earth's Daughters, A Room of Our Own, and elsewhere. Janna Willoughby-Lohr was awarded the "Best Spoken Word Artist" title in the Artvoice Best of Buffalo Awards 2010. Her poems have been published in Earth's Daughters and are anthologized in Celebrating Western New York Poets (White Buffalo Publications, 2015). She was a Grand Slam finalist in 2005-2008 for the Nickel City Poetry Slam, and a member of the 2006 Nickel City Slam team at the National Poetry Slam. She has been a teaching artist for Just Buffalo Literary Center. Janna also performs with her band, The Blood Thirsty Vegans. She founded and runs a handmade paper and blank books company, Papercraft Miracles. ryki zuckerman is the author of Looking for Bora Bora (Saddle Road Press, 2013). and three chapbooks, body of the work (Textile Bridge Press), the nothing that is (Benevolent Bird Press, 2015), and a bright nowhere (FootHills, 2015), as well as a micro-book, suite of six (Destitute Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Black Mountain College II Review, Slipstream, Steel Bellow, Swift Kick, Lips, Escarpments, Paunch, The Other Herald, and Pure Light, as well as the Buffalo News and Artvoice; online at poetry superhighway, Moondance, and Dispatches; anthologized in Brigid's Fire, in Mo' Joe, the Anthology (Beatlick Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2014) and A Celebration of Western New York Writers (Buffalo Legacy Publication, 2015); and has appeared as broadsides from Serendipity Arts and the Tea Leaves Collection. A retired teacher, she is the curator of both the Wordflight at Red Doors Series and the Gray Hair Series.