The Nick Virgilio Writers House Presents: A Joint Book Launch Event for Kathleen O'Toole's THIS FAR & NVWH first annual poetry anthology. Come hear from this year's contributors, learn more about our new press imprint Upright Remington and find out more about NVWH programming.
Hosted by Henry Brann & Kathleen O'Toole Free Entry (All Donations support programming at the HVWH) Light Refreshments
Kathleen O’Toole has combined an active professional life in community organizing with poetry and teaching. Her friendship with Nick Virgilio, while living in South Philly and worshipping at Sacred Heart between 1982 and Nick’s death in 1989, helped plant the seeds of her poetic vocation. She received her MA from Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1991, and has seen her poems published widely in magazines and journals since then, but her first published poems (Asphodel, 1985) were the result of Nick’s encouragement. In fact he submitted 2 of her poems to Asphodel without telling her until they were accepted!
After Nick’s death she began trying her hand at haiku, and served as the Chairperson of the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association for over a decade starting in 1990. She, along with Henry Brann, Raffael de Gruttola, Rick Black and others have presented Nick’s life and work at national and international haiku conferences and venues. Her own haiku have appeared in Frogpond, Modern Haiku, Heron’s Nest, Wishbone Moon (international anthology of haiku by women) and The Red Moon Anthology of English Language Haiku.
However, longer form poems that have been published and collected in two chapbooks (Practice (2005), and Waking Hours (2017), and Meanwhile, (2011), a previous book. She co-wrote In the Margins: a conversation in poetry (2017) with three other women who are longtime writing partners. And now This Far, who title poem was inspired by a Nick Virgilio Haiku (having come this far// alive at fifty-five// the morning star) has been released by Paraclete Press. It is appropriate that the first stop on Kathleen’s book tour will be at the Nick Virgilio Writers’ House. She is delighted to be able to return to the city and neighborhood where Nick, Fr. Michael Doyle and others agitated and encouraged her to marry her commitment to social justice and leadership development with the poetic gift of her Irish forebears, and her Italian-American mother who “read poems to me//no doubt in the womb…”
