William Rivera & Elisavietta Ritchie will read at 7 pm, Wednesday, 28 June, at Kensington Row Bookshop, 3786 Howard Avenue, Kensington MD 20895,
(301-949-9416. ). Open reading follows.

Both poets have travelled widely and studied, lived and worked abroad, but both also are long active in literary circles in the Greater Washington Area. Their work appears in Innisfree, Gargoyle, Loch Raven, and many other publications throughout the world as well as in translation.

William Rivera published five poetry collections: At the End of Legend’s String, (Views Press), Noise (Broadkill River Press), Buried in the Mind's Backyard (Brickhouse), The Living Clock (Finishing Line), Café Select (Poet's Choice), and another is in progress. Recently professor of Adult Education and Agricultural Extension and Development, Rivera worked at the Library of Congress and overseas as an agricultural economist. He taught for several years at Syracuse University and later for thirty-three years at the University of Maryland, College Park. He also has two academic books to his credit: Planning Adult Learning: Issues, Practices and Directions, and Agricultural Extension Worldwide.

Elisavietta Ritchie, long a workshop leader, poet-in-the-schools, and translator, lived in Australia, Canada, Europe, the Middle and Far East. She has led various creative writing workshops over the years, and for five years as a graduate teaching fellow, also taught French translation at American University. The United States Information Service sponsored her readings overseas. She spent 13 years as president of the Washington Writers Publishing House, and created the Wineberry Press. With twenty books and chapbooks of poetry, and two of Stories & Half-Stories, her latest titles, from Poets’ Choice Publishers, are Reflections: Poems on Paintings, A Poet’s Gallery; Babushka's Beads: A Geography of Genes, on her Russian ancestors, and a new collection in press, HARBINGERS.

Notes on Fires Eternal Morning from the Author:
Fires Eternal Morning is an exploration of the stream of Unconscious memory. Along with the telling of dream stories and childhood perspectives, its aspiration is also to stimulate the reader’s recollection of recent and forgotten dreams. Creating a prose-poem “landscape of dreams,” -- a “dream of consciousness” -- Fires Eternal Morning is a free-metaphor reflecting multiple layers of allegory. After the anthropology of Margaret Mead, the story is "A Coming of Age in the Cold War": Set in a place called “Paradise Green,” John Hauberc, survivor of a radiation war, tries to find his way back from the precipice of loss in a world torn asunder. He follows the map of Dante, through the Inferno of nuclear catastrophe, and the rubble of cities; through the Purgatory of emotions and dangerous political intrigues; and into the Paradise of Mind and Body... The fires are the fires of global apocalypse, the fires of love, the fires of irony and wit, the fires of alchemical transformation...