First Tuesdays Presents Celest Woo

When: June 3, 2025
Where: Espresso 77 Café, 35-57 77th Street, Jackson Heights, NY 11372.
Time: 7:00 — 8:30 PM (open-mic sign up at 6:30)
Cost: $5 minimum purchase at the food counter.
More Information: Richard Jeffrey Newman

Celestine Woo is an English teacher at Trevor Day School on the Upper East Side. She began her career as a professor of English at various colleges in New York and Colorado. She then transitioned to teaching high school in the Bard High School Early College network, in Harlem and Newark, NJ. At Bard, she taught English and French for 9 years, before moving to her current school. She has published scholarly work as well as fiction, memoir, and poetry, both in print and online. Her academic specialties include Shakespeare performance history, British Romanticism, Asian American Literature, and Children’s/Young Adult Literature. Her first poetry chapbook, Burnished Sol, was published by Pudding House, and explores themes of cross-cultural conflict and religious oppression. Her first full-length poetry book, Frost Fair Dance, was published by Clare Songbirds Publishing House, and explores two of her favorite themes: dance and winter. Currently, she is nearing completion of a book-length memoir about growing up in, and coming away from, a very restrictive religious background. She has been a modern dancer for over thirty years, and a choreographer. She has had several poems included in the anthologies of dance-themed poetry published by Imagination Press, edited by Johnny M. Tucker. She lives in Westchester.

Here’s an excerpt from The Page-Turner, Celest’s upcoming memoir:

The way I grew up in Southern California, 500 people constituted an average-sized wedding. That was about the size of our Chinese Baptist congregation, so if you figure the bride is from our church, invites 350, and 250 show up, and the groom comes from a larger church, so let’s say 300 people from there come, and now toss in a brother of the bride who is a pastor, so he’s bringing along a dozen minions from his church, and then you add in the couple’s college friends, high school friends, extended family, colleagues–you get the idea. The biggest weddings I attended probably had about 1000, although those were rare and noteworthy. When I got married, I’d been away from California a couple years, and away from the church for longer than that. My fiancé was from the East Coast, so most of his friends were not going to make it out west. So, when my childhood friend Leo asked how many guests we were expecting and I said 350, he replied, “Oh, nice and cozy.” He wasn’t being ironic. In fact, I’d been feeling a bit embarrassed about the pathetic turnout.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.