Passings :: Janine Pommy Vega

Janine Pommy Vega author of eighteen books and chapbooks since 1968, including The Green Piano (2005), her first CD, Across the Table, recorded in Woodstock, and from live performances in Italy and Bosnia (2007), and an Italian translation of her travel book Tracking the Serpent (Sulle tracce del serpente, Nutrimenti, Rome – 20007) died peacefully at home on December 23, 2010.

Vega performed with music and solo, in English and Spanish, in international poetry festivals, museums, prisons, universities, cafes, nightclubs, and migrant workers’ camps in South America, North America and Europe. She was the Director of Incisions/Arts, an organization of writers working with people behind bars; she taught inside prisons for more than twenty-five years, and taught a course in poetics for Bard Prison Initiative. She worked as well in creative writing programs in public schools, elementary through high school-all grades for over twenty years.

Information from Janine Pommy Vega’s official website. Photo by John Sarsgard, 2009.