2nd Annual Miriam Chaikin Writing Award Reading

CHAIKIN AWARD poster (2018)

Join us for an evening of readings by Award winners Joan Hall poetry, Kelly Nicole Long poetry, Joyce Yaeger prose.

Native New Yorker, Joan Hall is a pioneer in the field of collage and assemblage illustration. Hall’s collages and assemblages have been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. She was commissioned by the American Cultural Center to lecture, exhibit, and conduct workshops in France, India, Brazil, and recently lectured at The National Arts Club in New York City.

Joan illustrated “The Policeman’s Beard Is Half-Constructed”, the first book ever written by a computer with a program called Racter and published by Warner Books.
Known for her artwork, Joan has also been writing poetry since she was 8 years old, when her poem, “Spring” won best in class. She is presently illustrating a book of her own poetry.
She has been a resident of Westbeth Artist Housing in New York City since 1971.

Kelly Nicole Long (b. 1984) is a visual artist and writer living and working in Chicago, IL. She was born and raised in Jacksonville, FL where she both attended and taught in Catholic schools. The politically fraught Floridian landscape, along with her experiences in Catholic institutions inform her artistic practice. Long earned a BFA in Ceramics and Sculpture from the University of North Florida (2005), and an MFA in Visual Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her interdisciplinary practice encompasses ceramics, installation, and writing.

For 45 years, Joyce Yaeger had a “day job” in public relations, moving on to the rest of her life in 2016. Her most recent paid job was as an exec at a mid-size PR firm in New York City. But her favorite job was as head of PR for The New York Public Library where she once had a private showing of the typewritten manuscript of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ with Ezra Pound’s heavy black pencil edits. She also once held one of Virginia Woolf’s diaries in her greasy little hand (until it was politely removed). Very cool.

Most of the rest of her career, she developed and managed healthcare PR programs for Big Pharma She is a graduate of Syracuse University and started her career as a reporter for the Syracuse Post-Standard. She has lived in New York City since 1970 in lots of neighborhoods (East and West Villages, Chelsea, Gramercy, Hell’s Kitchen, Upper East and West Sides and Midtown West).

Today she lives in Midtown East with her partner Danielle of 11 years, and two cats, none of which write fiction. All four of them try to spend as many summer weekends as possible in Cherry Grove, Fire Island. In 1999, she was thrilled to receive the “MAGIC” award from Gilda’s Club, a cancer support community which she helped found. As a new writer of short fiction, she is even more proud of receiving the Miriam Chaiken Award for Writing.