On Wednesday, December 6, 2017, at 7 pm, Just Buffalo Literary Cafe at CFI will present poet Nicolas Eckerson (from Rochester), local and L.A. actor Jack Hunter, poet Deborah Osborne, and poet Julio Montalvo Valentin reading their work at the Center for Inquiry, 1310 Sweethome Rd., Amherst. Free and open to the public. Light refreshments.
NICOLAS ECKERSON is a recent graduate of R.I.T. and studied with John Roche. The work of 20th century poets is highly attractive to him, although he is well grounded in contemporary writing also. He has work in the anthology Cloudburst from Foothills Publishing (2017).
JACK HUNTER grew up near Pittsburgh, PA and put in his mandatory steel mill time before serving in the USAF. He used the G.I. Bill to discover theater and acting at Penn State University. From undergraduate studies Jack went to Buffalo and earned an MA in theater direction from the University of Buffalo. He shuffled back and forth between Buffalo and NYC where he worked Off and Off-Off Broadway. He also appeared on the soap Ryan’s Hope and in national commercials before settling in Buffalo to help raise a family. He had roles in 3 different shows at the Studio Arena (one starring Kelsey Grammar, one with Julianne Moore) and won an Artie (one of four he’s been awarded) for the one-man show (at the Alleyway Theater), A Night in November. He taught theater classes at four different colleges, including NCCC. Not long after his daughter turned 18, he headed to Hollywood. In his first starring role, in the short film songbird, Jack premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and screened numerous times after on the Sundance Channel. Jack stars as Roger Horton, the spokesman for Cracked’s Honest Ads series, which has over 25 million views. (To view the series search “Cracked’s Honest Ads Playlist” on YouTube.) This will be his first reading from his own writing, his memoirs.
Deborah Osborne, one of the original curators of the early Dog Ears (Bookstore) Reading Series, was the winner of the Just Buffalo Literary Center’s Labor in Literature contest for poetry in the early 1990s, and won the Boomdays poetry competition in 2008. She has had 20 poems published in the Buffalo News since 1993, poems in Artvoice, and more recently her work has been published in steel bellows. She has read at 100.000 Poets, at the Wordflight Series, and elsewhere. Deborah produced a series of literary podcasts interviewing Buffalo poets a few years ago.
JULIO MONTALVO VALENTIN is the author of two chapbooks, Don’t Give up the Ship (2015), and Ship Lost (2016), He co-hosts Ground and Sky Buffalo Poetry Series at Rustbelt Books in Buffalo and is a member of Just Poets of Rochester. He is also a member of the Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective which runs a local kitchen table press. This past summer he toured with the collective doing readings across the country from New Jersey to New Mexico. He is a guest blogger for Plurality Press. Originally studying anthropology, he has changed his major at SUNY College at Buffalo to Creative Writing.