Georgia A. Popoff, of Syracuse, NY, is a "community poet," expressed as performance poet, educator, editor, and spoken word producer. As a performer, she has toured both the west and east coasts extensively, coupling these efforts with opportunities to teach in schools and provide peer workshops in communities where she reads. Among her past projects as producer, she coordinated numerous reading series and local events in Central New York, including two international poetry programs, Poets for Peace International, and the United Nation’s sponsored Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry (www.dialoguepoetry.org), in collaboration with the Everson Museum of Art.
Georgia is the current managing editor for The Comstock Review (www.comstockreview.org) and has served as a Comstock Review editor for nearly 15 years. In the mid-90s, she was poetry editor for Central New York Environment for 5 years.
She competed in the 1994 and 1995 National Poetry Slams and was an emcee in the 1998 national slam. Poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Asheville Poetry Review, Dharma Connection, Light of Consciousness, Midwest Poetry Review, Poetpourri, Red Brick Review, and Salt Hill Journal, among others. Her work has been included in the anthologies The Waist is a Terrible Thing to Mind: A Wake Up Call (Breakthrough Press, 2000); Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (Manic D Press, 2000); 2001 Di-Verse-City: Poets of the Austin International Poetry Festival; and the Syracuse Cultural Workers’ nationally noted Women Artists Datebook in 1998, 2000, and 2003. In 2007, Georgia won first place and honorable mention for two poems submitted to the Central New York chapter of the American Pen Women for their annual contest.
Critical writings have been published in numerous trade journals, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Chalkboard, and she is a peer reviewer for the Teaching Artist Journal. She also maintains a blog of her experiences as poet and educator (http://gappoet.blogspot.com).
Georgia’s first collection of poetry, Coaxing Nectar from Longing, was published by Hale Mary Press in 1997. A new collection, The Doom Weaver, was released by Main Street Rag Publications in March 2008. Additionally, she has been included in the Pudding House Publications invitational chapbook series, Gold: The Greatest Hits, her edition having been released in summer 2003. (www.puddinghouse.com)
In early 2011, Teachers & Writers Collaborative will release Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy, and Social Justice in Classrooms and Community, a collaborative book co-authored with Quraysh Ali Lansana, of Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing. Additionally, she will have an essay included in an anthology of writing exercises for poets to be published in late 2011 by Dos Gatos Press.
Web-based publications include poets4peace, MAP of Austin Poetry, The Poet’s Porch, the Wrtiers’ Hood, as well as moderating an ongoing on-line poetry workshop with participants from the U.S., Canada, the U.K, and Australia. As a teaching artist, she has presented workshops at poetry festivals, in schools, afterschool programs, adult education centers, community centers, women’s shelters, day camp, juvenile detention facilities, museums, and libraries, teacher’s in-services. Georgia has been a coach for the NAACP ACT-SO program for African American teens since 1994. In June 2001, she facilitated a week-long workshop for poets in Tuscany and in 2003 presented a workshop at the first International Performance Poetry Conference at the University of Bath in the U.K.
Georgia is a member of the teaching staff of the Downtown Writers Center, the Syracuse chapter of the YMCA national Writers Voice program. With the Syracuse YMCA, she coordinated a summer expressive arts program for the YMCA Camp Iroquois day camp for 2 years, serving nearly 1,200 children annually. Within the field of arts in education, Georgia served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association of Teaching Artists (www.teachingartists.com) for 8 years and for 5 years as the Central New York Program Director for Partners for Arts Education (www.arts4ed.org), an agency that funded and supported arts-in-education programs for teaching artists, educators, and cultural organizations.
Currently, Georgia is the Writer in Residence for the Middletown, NY school district, where she is teaching in classrooms in five schools and providing extensive workshops for teachers. Additionally, she is a teaching artist and professional development consultant to the Watkins Glen School District, along with residencies in several other NYS school districts. Georgia is represented by the Betsy DuBois Agency for her work in schools and community as a teaching artist (www.betsydubois.com).
In addition, her work in community-based programs and in-service trainings are quite popular and her skills are in high demand from teacher centers, literary centers, juvenile detention facilities, and cultural organizations. Georgia is a frequent presenter at national conferences, including AWP, the South Carolina International Reading Council, the National Council of Teachers of English, the New York State Council on the Arts CommonGround conference, and the New England Consortium of Arts-Educator Professionals among them. She is also a part-time instructor in the Rene Crowne Honors Program at Syracuse University, and has been a guest lecturer at several other colleges and universities,
The three strongest elements of what Georgia feels her poetry expresses are heart, truth, and community, the community of common experience in the human condition. Poetry is her joy, her passion, and her mission.
