Jersey Shore Poets is a poetry writing group that meets once a month at the Eatontown Public Library. It is now in its seventh year. The purpose of the group is to provide a supportive environment for local working poets in the Monmouth County, New Jersey to write, revise and critique their writing as well as to provide information, feedback and support to hone their craft and to seek various opportunities for public reading and publishing. The group also encourages and promotes the writing and appreciation of poetry through various local readings and instructional events. This year, for the first time, JSP has published an anthology, Jersey Shore Poets/First Edition. By the title of this anthology, you might think that this is a collection of writing about the Jersey shore, but it is oh so much more than that! It includes not only of the written work of its twelve members, but the work of over thirty five nationally renowned poets and writers, a group that includes two US Poet Laureates as well as three Pulitzer Prize winners.
About the Author: EDITORS CHRISTOPHER BOGART AND GREGG G. BROWN CHRISTOPHER BOGART is a retired educator who is listed in Who's Who Among America's Teachers a recipient of New Jersey State Department of Education "Best Practice" Award, a NJ Equity Hall of Fame Member, a recipient of the "A+ For Kids" Teachers' Network Award and a Claes Nobel Educator of Distinction (2006, 2007). He is a working poet and writer with an MA in Creative Writing from Monmouth University and who lives in Monmouth County, New Jersey. In 2015, he was chosen as First Runner Up for Monmouth University's inaugural The Joyce Carol Oates Award for Excellence in Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Non-Fiction. He is the founder of Jersey Shore Poets, and has organized the annual poetry event for National Poetry Month called, "Poets Live!" in its fourth consecutive year at Monmouth County Library/Eastern Branch. On August 1, 2005, he presented a paper on the importance of poetry in the teaching of literature and writing to the Oxford Round Table at the Oxford Union Debate Hall at Oxford University. He is presently writing poetry and short stories, as well as working on his first novel, tentatively titled The Beast, about the plight of two Central American teenage migrants who flee the poverty of their native Honduras to find a better life in El Norte. GREGG G. BROWN is a poet from Monmouth County, NJ who has run BLAST PRESS, a micro-publisher of fine literature for the last 30 years. The Jersey Shore Poets anthology, "First Edition" is BLAST PRESS' second foray into curating an anthology of NJ poets; the first was 2014's "Palisades, Parkways & Pinelands." He joined the the Jersey Shore Poets writers group half a decade ago.