Staff Report
Bright Hill Press, located at Bright Hill Center on 94 Church St. in Treadwell, has been awarded a $50,000 challenge grant from the Capital Program of the New York State Council on the Arts to build a library wing with community Internet access. The library, designed by Delhi native Laurie Hunt, an architect with the Crissey Group in Syracuse, will be handicapped-accessible, with a reading and quiet-games loft for children. The library will hold up to 5,000 volumes of literary prose and poetry, as well as a children's book collection, and there will be free Internet access for the community. Bright Hill must match the $50,000 grant by Aug. 1 in order to begin constructing the wing, and the organization has planned a number of fund-raising events in order to meet the challenge. The kickoff event will be a fine art auction at the center from 2 to 6 p.m. Saturday. Items can be previewed Advertisement from 10 a.m to 5 p.m. throughout this week. Oneonta resident Charles Koenig will serve as presiding auctioneer of the paintings, prints, photographs, ceramics, drawings, artists' books, jewelry and collage donated by regional artists and coordinated by BHP board member Marjorie Bradley Kellogg. On Sunday, Bright Hill Center's Word and Image Gallery will open its next exhibit, "Duality," which includes paintings by Lisbeth Firmin of Franklin and poems by John O'Connor of Franklin and New York City. Their exhibit will be followed in July by the "Ex Libris" Group Show of regional artists for Treadwell's annual Stagecoach Run Open Studios Festival. July will also feature a literary dinner in Cooperstown with a menu of foods from literature. The evening is being coordinated by board members Ernest M. Fishman and Pamela Peters. On July 25, Bright Hill will play host to a poetry slam, presided over by Richard Bernstein, coach of Norwich's four-time winning Share the Words High-School Poetry Competition teams. Entry fees will fund prizes and benefit the Bright Hill Library Wing. In August, Bertha Rogers' "Even the Hemlock: Reliquaries and Illuminations" interdisciplinary exhibit, for which she received a Ludwig Vogelstein grant and a NYSCA Community Arts grant, will open. Other events planned for this season are Word Thursdays' 11th season of readings, including regional writers Hilda Mader Wilcox of Cooperstown, Jose Raul Bernardo of Downsville, Charlotte Zoe Walker of Gilbertsville, Robin Howe of West Delhi, Susan Hoover of Woodstock; Mermer Blakeslee of Roscoe, Douglas Paugh and Nancy Mercado of Binghamton, Jay Rogoff of Saratoga Springs, Ron DeLuca of Hancock, Jordan Smith of Clifton Park, Dan Wilcox of Albany, Joan McNerney of Ravena and Joseph Bruchak of Greenfield. In partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts, Bright Hill will present the new online New York State Literary Map. This map will feature hundreds of New York writers and literary resources, including libraries, literary organizations, literary sites and bookstores. The map will be accessible through the New York State Literary Curators website, www.nyslittree.org, developed and administered by Bright Hill Press, in partnership with the New York State Council on the Arts. Word Thursdays will present its ninth season of Literary Workshops for Kids beginning June 23 and continuing throughout the summer. Workshops for adults will also be offered in fiction and poetry writing and book arts. Bright Hill Press and its programs are funded, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts, the A. Lindsay and Olive B. O'Connor Foundation, the Walter Rich Charitable Foundation, the Otis A. Thompson Foundation, the Dewar Foundation, the A. C. Molinari Foundation, the Merrill Family Foundation, area businesses and its members and friends.