Upcoming readings and events
- Location – Book Love, 7 Village Green S., Plymouth, MA 02360
Details – Join us for an evening of poetry featuring Judith Partelow, Glyn Dowden, Robin Smith Johnson, and Dzvinia Orlowsky. Each poet will share 10 minutes of their work with a Q/A and signing to follow.
Judith Partelow has lived on Cape Cod for over 40 years. Her poetry has been published in numerous compilations. Her most recent book is Passion & Provocation, Selected Poems by Judith Partelow is available on Amazon. Her chapbooks include A Woman’s Heart, and Carry Me Back, A Woman’s Life in Poetry. Her first play is entitled, A Woman’s Heart. Her most recent play, a collaboration with other writers, is entitled NEIGHBORS! She is an actress, playwright, and director. www.judithpartelow.com
I am Judith Partelow
…there’s a definite flow to this collection. Not just through Partelow’s themes—domesticity, love, loss, memory, and on to places and spirituality—but through her voice itself, which is warm and personal through all the various stories these poems tell.
Passion and Provocation is indeed both: the poet’s expression of her passion, her life stages and events, the spaces she’s filled with people and memories… and in the process provoking in readers echoing recollections and connections. It’s a compilation that will resonate in minds and hearts after the poems themselves have been long since read, a celebratory, intimate study of one life and all the lives that have touched it.
I've been reading your poetry and enjoying your thoughtful observations of life's many challenges, blessings, losses and gifts, everything from losing a love, and mourning a poor squirrel, to reflecting on how a much traveled suitcase, while replaced by newer models, still reminds one of old memories. Your poems reflect so many intimate details of living, loving and losing and retrieving, yearning for that infinite something and giving one's all.
PLAYWRIGHT
A WOMAN’S HEART, the play, was created from Judith Partelow’s poetry and was produced six times from 2017 through 2019 with producer Janet Murphy Robertson of artistsandmusicians.org at The Jacob Sears Library and the Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis; for the Women’s International
Playwrights’ Festival in Provincetown; at the Cape Cod Cultural Center in South Yarmouth; and at the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater (WHAT), all to
standing ovations. A musical version of the play was adapted from the original with musician Dana McCoy and produced at the Cotuit Center for the Arts Black Box for twelve sold-out performances in 2019. The play was taught as a course at Cape Cod Community College by Professor Rod Owens as part of the Academy of Lifelong Learning in 2018. One quote from that class by Catherine Kelly-Mahon (author): “Shakespeare gave us the Ages of Man; now Partelow gives us the Ages of Woman” Also, “A Woman’s Heart is the truth of human experience expressed in beautiful poetry”
NEIGHBORS! Her second play had staged readings in September 2022 at the Cotuit Center for the Arts with over 100 people in attendance, and at the Wellfleet Preservation Hall in December 2023 with close to the same number. They were then called back to do an additional performance for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on January 15, 2024. Other planned work-in-progress performances will be on Indigenous Peoples Weekend, October 11, 12, 13 2024 at the Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second Street, East Cambridge, MA. NEIGHBORS addresses the impact of racism in our society and has been received with great acclaim. Scenes from the play are available to be used in schools, churches, or organizations to stimulate discussion about racism. The play was developed under a grant from the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod. The NEIGHBORS logo was created by Robin J. Miller.
More about Judith Partelow's Creative Works
She has been a featured poet on numerous occasions, including a 2016 Alzheimer’s Benefit; Writers’ Night Out of the Cape Cod Writers Center; the Cultural Center of Cape Cod where she has also been a long-time participant in their Mutual Muses exhibit; ; in Wellfleet for Barry Hellman’s National Poetry Month; for Neil Silberblatt’s Voices of Poetry in Chatham and Brewster; Provincetown’s Writers’ Cafe; at the Brewster Ladies’ Library; at the Dennis Memorial Library as founder and member of the Scargo Hill Poets; the Cotuit Center for the Arts in Kami Lyle’s Sit Awhile; and at the Cape Cod Theatre Company in Harwich along with poet Charles Harper. She has been interviewed for cable TV programs: the Cape Cod Writers Center’s Books and the World, by Madeleine Miele Holt; by Deb Hoch for A Woman’s Outlook, Seekonk TV; Provincetown cable tv; as well as WOMR-FM programs with Pandora Peoples and Candace Hammond. Her poems have won awards in the WOMR Outermost Poetry Contests, Veterans for Peace, and Katharine Lee Bates poetry contests, among others. She’s been published in various publications including magazines, newspapers, books and on radio. Partelow is an actress and director who has appeared in numerous theatrical productions, readings, and films over the years. She is a featured character in the cable series Offseason, created by Nathan Butera of Provincetown, and streamed on Amazon Prime. She is a member of Screen Actors’ Guild and Actors Equity.
Partelow is on the board of the Cape Cod Writers Center. Her poetry has been published in compilations including: Cape Women On-Line; Voices from A Borrowed Garden; Spiritual Mothering Journal; A Sense of Place; World of Water, World of Sand; Baha’i Anthology on Martyrs; The City of the Covenant News; The Norwalk News; Baha’i Vizier and Lines of Fracture (translated into Dutch); Baha’i World Volumes; Brilliant Star Magazine; Katharine Lee Bates Collections 2013/2014; Veterans for Peace 2013; The Cape Cod Times: Albert Oubochowsky’s. play, Black Thursday; Slant, A Journal of Poetry; and From the Farther Shore, Cape Cod and the Islands Through Poetry. Her poem Bedtime Story was awarded second place by Marge Piercy in the Cape Cod division of the WOMR Outermost Poetry Contest of 2014, and Summer’s Harvest received Honorable Mention in that same contest for 2021. Her many achievements with poetry won her the Cape Cod Writers’ Conference Kevin V. Symmons Scholarship for Second Career Writers at its 2018 conference.
She is married to writer Thom Slayter and has lived on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for over forty years. She has three children, six grandchildren, and a great-grandchild. She is a member of the Philanthropic Educational Organization (P.E.O.) that raises scholarship money for furthering women’s education. She is a member of the Baha’i Faith and is available for speaking engagements to present its teachings. She is also available for poetry readings and various dramatic readings. Contact judithpartelow@gmail.com.
A couple of poems for reading
Summer’s Harvest
My tomato plant is the harvest of this summer’s quarantine — the first fruit I’ve grown in my seventy years: a tangible pleasure. I cradle the pot like a baby It listens and bears first red — I pluck the largest The young green ones I wish I could hear it grow Revised from Tomato Plant, Oct. 30, 2020 that was printed in the CCT |
One Summer's Day
I threw my blanket Then in some peculiar rage I forgave the rage Perhaps one corner at a time but I cannot fling it wide again – Judith Partelow |