A celebration of Somerville’s small presses will be held Monday, Feb. 19, at 8 p.m. at Club Passim, 7 Palmer St. in Harvard Square. For contact info and directions, click here.

Anyone familiar with literary history knows the importance of the small press movement. Poets from Whitman to Frost have cut their teeth in the little magazines, and small presses that have traditionally published emerging poets and writers. The small or alternative press can be a means or an end in itself to help poets and writers outside the ivory walls of the academy get published and be heard.

The Campbell River Arts Council will be holding a Book-Making Workshop on Feb. 18 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Sybil Andrews Cottage, 2131 South Island Highway.

Gwen Kushner will be leading the workshop. The day is intended to introduce the art of hand-made books. Each participant will leave at the end of the day with a completed book.

There is an entire field of possibilities to making your owns books. Contents can range from: poetry, prose, photographs, collage, short stories, children’s stories, etc. You are only limited by your imagination.

Vis Pamela Rosenblatt of the Somerville News—a story about a member of the Small Press Exchange, Doug Holder. You can check out Doug's profile, here.

The arts editor of The Somerville News received a Certificate of Appreciation for his community access television program at the organization’s annual meeting Jan.25.

“I think Doug Holder really provides an excellent service to the larger writer community in Somerville.  And it’s not just ‘Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer’ that he does.  Besides ‘Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer’, he also writes his column in The Somerville News, and produces The Somerville News’ Writer’s Festival.  He’s really a dynamo in support of Somerville’s writers and readers,” said Wendy Blom, executive director of Somerville Community Access Television.

As a major local poet, writer, journalist, and inter-viewer, Doug Holder is highly regarded in the Somerville and surrounding areas, said Wendy Blom.

She met Holder the first week she started at SCAT in 2005, she said. “And I was immediately impressed by the commitment to the show that he does and the ease with which he draws out his guests,” she said.

Holder said he developed such an admirable reputation in the writing community through years of study and dedication to his craft. 

Focusing on the business and career of writing, the conference, now in its third year, has built up a considerable reputation for quality instruction from knowledgeable publishing insiders. The Conference features programming on a variety of literary and publishing topics, including workshops in online publishing, marketing, public relations, query letters, book proposals, the writing process, memoirs, and independent publishing, as well as providing opportunities to meet top-notch editors and literary agents.

Last year's Writers' Conference was a vibrant and informative event that featured such authors, agents, editors and publishers as Jonathan Ames, Greg Godek, Nuala O'Faolain, Sigrid Nunez, Andy Greenwald, Denise Oswald (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Jennifer Robinson (Simon Spotlight Entertainment), Paul Slovak (Viking), Laurel Touby (MediaBistro), Rachel Vater (Lowenstein-Yost), Sean Wilsey, and Lou Young (WCBS-TV).

From Katie Haegele and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

This morning, in my kitchen, Richard Hell was talking about the world. He said:

"Humans are a small part.

But a speaking one!"

I was listening to the punk legend's "Winter Poem," which I downloaded from the online poetry project PENNsound, here. And—since I never have actually seen the text of his poem, only heard it online - I don't know how he'd feel about my putting that exclamation point there, but that's what it sounded like to me.

Home to more than 7,000 audio files of poets reading their work, PENNsound has had nearly 11 million visitors since its launch in January 2005. It's the brainchild of the poet Charles Bernstein, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English and director of Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW), where the archive is housed.