(RED HOOK, N.Y.) – Novelist Carol Goodman, writer Karen Crumley Keats, author and performance artist Karen Schoemer, and poet and singer Judith Kerman are some of the writers, poets and performance artists taking part in the Story Slam at Taste Budds Cafe (40 Market St.) on Friday, November 21, 2014, at 7pm.

Karen Crumley Keats is a writer, photographer and performer. Her work has appeared in small press journals including The Bad Henry Review and Mudfish Poetry and Art Journal. Her photography has been exhibited in New York City and Hudson, New York. Her performance and theater work has been presented at numerous venues including PS 122 In NYC, The Public Theatre, Dixon Place, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, also in NYC. Among other projects, she is working on a story collection titled, The One Stories. At the November Story Slam in Red Hook, she will read The Lucky One, a piece from that collection. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her teenage son and dog, Harry Flowers.

Karen Schoemer is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and many other publications. Her book “Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ’50s Pop Music,” was published by Free Press in 2006 and her poetry has appeared in Chronogram and Zephyrs, the journal of the Millay Society. In 2013 she was a poetry fellow in the Platte Clove Artist-in-Residence program, sponsored by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development. When she’s not busy running the popular Spotty Dog Bookstore in Hudson, Karen keeps busy hosting The Schoemer Show on WGXC radio, (90.7 fm), creating live and recorded spoken word events and, of course, writing new material. Schoemer will read a variety of short fiction and poetry.

Carol Goodman has authored fourteen novels including The Lake of Dead Languages, The Seduction of Water, The Demon Lover, which Booklist named a top ten science fiction/fantasy book for 2012 and many other great titles. Carol is also a contributor to the Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley collection published by Codhill press in 2013.

Judith Kerman has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Galvanic Response (March Street Press) and Plane Surfaces/Plano de Incidencia (CCLEH), as well as three books of translations of Cuban and Dominican women writers (White Pine Press, BOA Editions, Mayapple Press). She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Dominican Republic in 2002. She founded Earth’s Daughters magazine in Buffalo, NY (1971 to present) and runs Mayapple Press, located in Woodstock, NY. A classical singer, she recently had her debut solo recital in Woodstock, including several song settings of her poems. Videos of her reading her poems, as well as her video documentary about Dominican Carnaval, can be seen on YouTube on the Judith Kerman channel.

Also reading is Dr. Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of English at SUNY New Paltz, where she teaches courses in composition, theories of writing, autobiography, creative writing, women’s literature, and Holocaust studies. Her poetry has been published in many journals including Kansas Quarterly, Cream City Review, Syracuse Scholar, Alaska Quarterly Review, Home Planet News, and Phoebe. Schmidt has published two volumes of poetry – We Speak in Tongues (the Edwin Mellen Press, 1991) and She had this memory (The Edwin Mellen Press 2000); two collections of autobiographical essays-Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Midlife, co-authored with Dr. Phyllis R. Freeman (Routledge 2000); and a multicultural, global literature anthology, Legacies: Fiction Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction (co-authored with the late Dr. Carley Bogarad and Dr. Lynne Crockett), which is heading into a fifth edition. Schmidt is a contributor and co-editor of A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley which was co-edited with Laurence Car, and published by Codhill Press.