CLUB DINNER & LIBRARY DEDICATION
Artists Among Us: An Evening of Members’ Music and Poetry
Friday, November 8, at 6:30 pm
OPEN TO MEMBERS & GUESTS
$60 per person - dinner & program
$20 per person - cocktail & program only
The Club’s refashioned Library of the Arts will be dedicated with a special evening of works by esteemed past and present Arts Club of Washington members. Soprano Jennifer Piazza-Pick, accompanied by pianist Ying-Shan Su, will perform songs composed by Amy Beach and Mary Howe, early female members whose compositions “broke the ceiling” of America’s concert halls. Interspersing the music program will be recitals by member poets Grace Cavalieri, Doritt Carroll, and Michael Whelan. Members and guests will be invited to browse the restored library during the cocktail reception.
Praised for singing with “passion and emotional depth” (Richmond Times-Dispatch), soprano Jennifer Piazza-Pick has performed with Opera Piccola of San Antonio and at the Princeton Festival, the Richmond and Alamo City Ballet companies, and the Charlottesville Symphony. Accompanist Ying-Shan Su is a Taiwanese pianist who is a doctoral student in Collaborative Piano at the University of Maryland and former staff accompanist at Cleveland’s Lee University.
Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867 –1944) was the first successful American female composer of large-scale art music, whose "Gaelic" Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896, was the first symphony composed and published by an American woman. Mary Howe (1882-1964) was an accomplished composer of over 20 large orchestral pieces and is particularly known for her late Romantic tone poems. With Amy Beach, she helped to organize the Association of Women Composers, and Ms. Howe is credited with raising the money to found the National Symphony Orchestra.
Grace Cavalieri is the author of 21 books and chapbooks of poetry, including her latest collection, Showboat (Goss Publishing, 2019). She is the host of "The Poet and the Poem," a weekly series of interviews broadcast from the Library of Congress via NPR satellite and Pacifica Radio. Winner of the 2013 George Garrett Award, the Pen-Fiction Award, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting Silver Medal, Grace currently serves as the Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland.
Doritt Carroll is the author of GLTTL STP (Brickhouse Books, 2013) and of a chapbook, Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner (Kattywompus, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Coal City Review, Poet Lore, Gargoyle, Nimrod, and Slipstream, among others. She has served as poet in residence at the Shakespeare Theater Company and currently runs the Arts Club’s lunchtime poetry series.
The poems of Michael Whelan have been published in The Coachella Review, The Eloquent Atheist, The Healing Muse, The Little Patuxent Review, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. His prose memoir pieces have appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and online on Irish Central. His book-length collection, After God (2014), explores Whelan’s faith as “a believing agnostic leprechaun.” Michael serves as Chairman of the Arts Club’s Literary Committee and is the impresario behind the library renovation.
Business dress.
A reservation is required for dinner by 5 pm the day before.
A reservation is recommended for cocktail & program only.
RSVP online or call (202) 331-7282 ext. 3
Complimentary parking after 6 pm at 2001 Pennsylvania Ave.
Members can canceled their reservation without a penalty until the day before the event.
