BATH

At 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 14, poet and writer Gibson Fay-LeBlanc and lyric fusion poet and performer Lady Zen will display their talents in “The Word: Written, Spoken, Sung.” They will read and perform their work and talk about how they started out, followed by a question and answer session with the audience. The program is free and open to the public.

Lady Zen (Alzenira Santos Amaral de Quezada) is an internationally known lyric poet who performs commissioned art as a director, performance poet and vocalist for numerous venues, colleges and festivals across the U.S., Europe, Mexico and Brazil. As a teaching artist, she’s presented workshops for young writers through poet laureate Wesley McNair’s Imagination 101 initiative designing curriculum for Maine public high schools. Lady Zen earned a Fulbright scholarship in Opera Performance from the University of Arkansas and holds a degree in Music Business Management from The Evergreen State College. This summer she was bestowed an MFA from Stonecoast Creative Writing program at USM. For the past five years Lady Zen has lived in Portland, Maine. Her work has been featured through the Maine Center for Creativity, AWP, and the Institute for Civic Leadership. Her ambition is to continue to write, perform, and teach Lyric Fusion Poetics.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, “Death of a Ventriloquist,” was chosen by Lisa Russ Spaar for the Vassar Miller Prize and published in 2012. The book received a starred review from “Publishers Weekly” and was featured by “Poets & Writers” as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including Guernica, The New Republic, and Tin House, on the PBS NewsHour Art Beat, and recently in jubilat, Slice and The Literary Review. He has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities around the country and including Columbia, Fordham and University of Southern Maine. In 2011 he was named one of Maine’s emerging leaders by the Portland Press Herald and MaineToday Media for his work directing “The Telling Room,” where he remains a teaching artist. He lives in Portland with his family and is at work on a novel and a new book of poems.

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