NORWICH – The Ninth Annual Colorscape Poetry Slam will take place at the Café Connection at 28 South Broad Street, Norwich, during the Colorscape Chenango Arts Festival on Saturday, Sept. 11, from 2 to 5 p.m. Free to the public, this year’s Slam will open with a reading from featured poet Joe Weil.

Joe Weil is a lecturer in the Graduate and under Graduate creative writing programs at SUNY Binghamton. He has been published in numerous literary journals, including Poet Lore, Onthebus, Rattle, The New Renaissance, Paddlefish, Maggie, Paterson Literary Review, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, and New York Quarterly, as well as in the New York Times, The Star Ledger, and the Princeton Packet.

At the end of 1998, he was the subject of an NJPBS television profile on his life, and, on St. Patrick’s Day of 2009, his poem, “The Dead Are In My Living Room” was featured in Best American Poetry online. Weil is the author of three chapbooks, and three full-length volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is The Plumber’s Apprentice (New York Quarterly Press).

As a reader, he has been featured with Allen Ginsberg (1995, Walt Whitman Center), Jan Beatty and Patricia Smith (2008 Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry festival), Louise Gluck (The 2000 Delaware Valley Poetry festival), and the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Stephen Dunn (2009, Distinguished Poet’s reading in Paterson). He is currently working on a book of essays, and, as a pianist/composer, is setting poems by Thomas Hardy and George Trakl to music.