Please do come and join and celebrate the arts of poetry and song for our last event of the season on JUNE 5th with our guest features David Daniel Susan Cattaneo and Peter LaGoy. Peter is a Hopkinton resident, poet, town revitalizer, marathon runner and environmental studies consultant. David Daniel is a widely published poet and singer-songwriter, founder of Wamfest (wamfest.org) and recently hosted an event with world-renowned musician Bruce Springsteen to come and sing and also talk poetry and songwriting with poets Paul Muldoon and Robert Pinsky among others. David  is also chairperson of the creative writing department at Fairleigh Dickinson University and editor of poetry journal The Literary Review.  Susan Cattaneo is a Nashville recording singer-songwriter and professor of songwriting at Berklee College. It will be an exciting finale to our entire season that has been so bountiful of  friendly, art-loving community members consisting of audience who come just to listen as well as the very talented poets, songwriters and spoken word artists who have performed as guest features and open mic participants this past year. 

Don't miss this last special event of season!  Next season's first program takes place at HCAM on October 16th.

your host,
Cheryl Perreault

Susan Cattaneo
Passion, drive, and great writing – these adjectives define the music and life of Susan Cattaneo. Raised in the farm country of New Jersey, Susan found her place in the musical world at an early age, singing six-part harmony with her family around the dinner table. After stints in bands in college, she spent a year in Italy, where she studied Italian and performed a mix of standards and traditional Roman songs in various piano bars in Rome. Upon her return to the States, she began a dual career in New York City. By day, Susan was a television writer/producer, earning an Emmy nomination and NY State Broadcasters Award. By night, she was the lead singer in the Blackfish Band, a funk-folk outfit that also launched the career of Mike Errico, and that became a regular fixture at clubs like The Bitter End and Kenny’s Castaways. Applying her writing talents to the craft of songwriting was a natural next step, and following her musical dream, Susan headed to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music on a vocal talent scholarship. Hired by the Berklee songwriting department upon graduation, Susan has spent the past few years splitting her time between teaching, raising two kids, and writing in Nashville, where three of her songs have been signed by producer/A&R man Michael Lloyd (Dirty Dancing, Belinda Carlile, Righteous Brothers, Frank Sinatra) for Curb Publishing.Brave and Wild marks Susan’s return to performing. She wrote or co-wrote all 11 tracks on the album, creating a cast of strong female characters who may go through adversity but are taking life head on. Like the women who inhabit her songs, Susan can be tender but she is not afraid to rock. Brave and Wild, her 2009 release was voted Boston debut of the year and one of the Top 10 records of the year (along with releases by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, U2 and the Avett Brothers) by Wicked Local. 

(left to right) Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, David Daniel and John Wesley Harding at Wamfest in New Jersey

David Daniel
David Daniel was raised just outside of Nashville, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. For over a decade, he was poetry editor of the literary journal Ploughshares and taught literature and poetry writing at Emerson College in Boston. His first full-length collection, Seven-Star Bird (Graywolf Press, 2003) won the Levis Reading Prize. Several poems from his new collection have been or will be featured soon, along with new essays, in The American Poetry Review. His poems have also appeared in such journals as AGNI, Witness, The Literary Review, LILT, Poetry East, the Antioch Review, and Post Road. His essays and reviews have been published in various venues, including the recent Field Guide to the Prose Poetry, from Rose Metal Press, Poetry and Lyrics, from The University of Mississippi Press,The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Journal of Country Music. Daniel was also president and co-founder of the first independent part-time faculty union in the East—the Affiliated Faculty of Emerson College. He received degrees from Vanderbilt University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Virginia, where he was a Henry Hoyns Fellow. Daniel is also a songwriter, and has been on tour with both his book and his music. He’s written songs for artists ranging from Shirley Bassey to Cold Truth, with whom he currently has an underground, classic rock hit with a song he co-wrote, “Peace With Me”. He directs the creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he is now co-poetry editor of The Literary Review, and where he founded WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival, an on-going celebration of songwriting, poetry, and the arts, which has featured such guests as Rosanne Cash, John Wesley Harding, Dave Marsh, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, David Gates, Jonathan Demme, Bruce Springsteen, Paul Muldoon, John Doe and Exene Cervenka, and many others. He is currently putting together an album of poet/songwriter collaborations including several of the poets and and songwriters who've been featured at Wamfest. This summer he hopes to complete his memoir, The Fall-Down Diet, which details his recovery from a catastrophic fall in 2007, while working on songs and poems. 

Peter LaGoy 
Peter LaGoy grew up in rural northwest Connecticut, moved to Washington D.C. for college, headed west to Berkeley, California for work, and then moved back to New England after the birth of his first child, settling in Hopkinton. During his school years, Peter wrote the requisite poems and prose, and read poetry extensively while getting an English minor at Georgetown. Through his early work years, he concentrated his creative skills on the new field of health risk assessment, with writings on such topics as “How much dirt do kids eat,” and “What’s a safe level of lead in soil in Aspen, Colorado,” culminating with the publication of the book “Risk Assessment” in 1994. 

Peter began writing for pleasure in the late 1900s during a life transition period. Initially, he focused on a prose recollection of family history, in a still growing summary tentatively entitled: Excerpts to Augment Memory. More recently, he has concentrated on writing poetry and with Cheryl’s encouragement, has read frequently at Wake Up and Smell the Poetry. Peter’s style models that of one of his favorite poets, Carl Sandburg, and consists of simplistic poems with brief messages. The poems touch on facets of a sometimes overactive existence, discussing children, nature, outdoor activities, human relationships, and volunteer work in Hopkinton.