Fish Tales: A Celebration of Hillsborough’s Biodiversity in Poetry and Myth

Event Details
You’ve heard about the one that got away. But have you ever heard the one about the monster pike named “Grendel’s Mother”? Or the ones about a ghostly fisherman that resembles a heron, a demon scarecrow that terrorized a town, or an angler who reeled in…a corpse? What about the tale of a tiny creature that went for ten years without food or water, or the one about the shark that lived for two hundred years?

A lifetime of fishing the waterways in and around Hillsborough has filled the creel of resident author Mathew V. Spano with stories and insights enough to fill a book. And that’s just what he has done. Join him for an afternoon of mythical poems and tall tales from his new book Hellgrammite (Blast Press, 2016), as well as insights into the very real issues of habitat protection, wildlife exploitation, endangered species and nature education. Following the presentation, the author will sell and sign books with all proceeds going to student scholarships.

Mathew V. Spano, Ph.D. has lived and fished in Hillsborough since 1975. Over the last twenty years, he has published poetry, short stories, and essays in various publications, such as The Los Angeles Times, Psychological Perspectives, and Frogpond, as well as in anthologies, such as Palisades, Parkways & Pinelands (Blast Press, 2016); Baseball Haiku: The Best Haiku Ever Written About the Game (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); and The Poets of New Jersey: From Colonial to Contemporary (Jersey Shore Publications, 2005). He teaches English Composition (including Writing for the Natural Sciences) and Mythology in Literature as a full-time professor at Middlesex County College in Edison, NJ.

Event Type(s): Adult Event