Radio Features for Monday, July 23: Caroline Harvey and Gracious Calamity

New & Improved poetry feature and workshop leader Caroline Harvey.

FEATURED POET: Caroline Harvey is an internationally renowned performer, writer, and educator. Her writing has been featured in print, film, and television, including season five of HBO’s Def Poetry, The Legendary, Gertrude Press, The Lowestoft Chronicle, and Harvard’s Charles River Review. She was a 2012 Pushcart Prize nominee, and was recently the recipient of a US Embassy grant to perform and teach writing in Serbia. Caroling is an Assistant Professor of Performance Technique and Poetry at Berklee College of Music and also teaches at berkleemusic.com, Berklee’s home for online education. She has performed and taught at schools and organizations nationwide, such as YouthSpeaks, the Esalen Institute, Lesley University, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She is honored to have shared stages and classrooms with such artists as Mos Def, Livingston Taylor, Alicia Keys, Melissa Ferrick, Susie Bright, Dave Chappelle, Donna De Lory, and many others. Also a somatic therapist and yoga teacher, Caroline’s writing explores ideas of the sacred and tracks her belief that even the fiercest traumas contain within them the capacity for profound healing and beauty.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION: Writer and performance poetry coach Caroline Harvey will lead a workshop before the show.


Kit Wallach and Kate Lee will be rocking out as Gracious Calamity at New & Improved.

Kit Wallach and Kate Lee will be rocking out as Gracious Calamity at New & Improved.

FEATURED MUSICAL GROUP: Gracious Calamity is a dream and an experiment, a product of Whitehaus veterans Kit Wallach and Kate Lee. The songs are green and the voices are ancient. The strings are whirling children, the hearts of ballerinas, aged six. The smiles and the rhythms are heart blasting dust roads of living glitter, and it will never make sense that these two secret and wonderful women are doing this for you. When a Gracious Calamity song begins, tiny areas of your body begin to remember the microscopic sensation of moisture and air molecules. The history of the country where you were born begins to race through your head and you start to remember for the first time. You remember chosing your surname. You remember generations of the canoe, fishing along the ice. The hallucinations are persistent and real. Listen in at graciouscalamity.bandcamp.com.

NEW AND IMPROVED MONDAYS is a weekly poetry and arts series on Mondays at Radio, a bar and performance space at 379 Somerville Ave., Union Square, Somerville. Doors open for the show at 6:30 p.m. and the workshop begins at 7:00. Open mic begins at 8:00. The poetry feature takes the stage at 9:00 for a half-hour feature and the visiting artist goes on thereafter. Cover charge is $5 and the show is 21+.