PSW Reading Series Archives 2010-2011

Possession Sound Writers presents:

Wednesday May 4
Everett Community College Main Campus
 
12:30 - 1:30 pm
Jackson Center Conference Room
Panel: Kizer's Art of Solidarity
 
2:00 - 3:00 pm
Russell Day Gallery
Reading and Celebration

Possession Sound Writers hosts a symposium to celebrate the arrival of the spring 2011 issue of Poetry Northwest, a tribute to founding editor Carolyn Kizer. Featured poets include David Rigsbee, Emily Warn, and Bethany Reid, who will speak about Kizer's role in American letters, as well as her "art of solidarity"--or passion for a poetry of public engagement, with a particular focus on the historical and contemporary struggles of women to be heard and received as equals in all walks of life.
 
Kizer grew up in Spokane, and was instrumental in founding Poetry Northwest, where she was editor for some seven years. Kizer left Seattle and the magazine in 1966 to take up a new position as the first director of literary programs at the National Endowment of the Arts. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1984. Now 85, she lives in Sonoma, California with her husband John Woodbridge.
 
Poetry Northwest editor and Written Arts program director Kevin Craft will moderate a panel on Kizer's life and art. The panel will be followed by a reading at the newly inaugurated Russell Day Gallery in the Parks Student Union on Everett Community College's main campus.
 
The event is made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Everett Community College Foundation and the Everett Cultural Arts Commission.

Participants Bios:

DAVID RIGSBEE is the author of 18 books and chapbooks, including seven previous full-length collections of poems.  His latest books, The Red Tower:  New & Selected Poems and The Pilot House, a Black River Poetry Prize Chapbook, were both recently released.  In addition to his poems, he has also published critical works on Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky.  He has co-edited two anthologies, including Invited Guest:  An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry, a “notable book” selection of the American Library Association and the American Association of University Professors and featured on C-Span Booknotes.  His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many others.  Winner of the Pound Prize and the Vachel Lindsay Award, he has also been recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Djerassi Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets.  He is 2010 winner of the Sam Ragan Award for contribution to the arts in North Carolina.  Rigsbee is currently contributing editor for The Cortland Review.

EMILY WARN was born in San Francisco and moved at the age of seven from the then Bohemian neighborhood in Marin, California to the Orthodox Jewish community in Detroit. For Warn, poetry links music and meaning every bit as powerfully and oddly as religious traditions do, inventing complicated, invisible relations. She moved to the Pacific Northwest 1978 to work for North Cascades National Park, and a year later moved to Seattle where she has lived, more or less ever since. She most recently served as the Webby Award–winning founding editor of poetryfoundation.org, and now divides her time between Seattle and Twisp, Washington. Warn has published five collections of poetry, including three books: The Leaf Path (1982), The Novice Insomniac (1996) and Shadow Architect (2008), all from Copper Canyon Press, and two chapbooks The Book of Esther (1986) and Highway Suite (1987). Her essays and poems appear widely, including in Poetry, BookForum, Blackbird, Parabola, The Seattle Times, The Writers’ Almanac, The Bloomsbury Review, The Stranger, and Critical Mass–the National Book Critics Circle blog.
She has taught creative writing or served as writer-in-residence at many schools and arts centers, including Lynchburg College in Virginia, The Bush School in Seattle, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, and Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. She was educated at Kalamazoo College and the University of Washington, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Emily has also worked in the high-technology, first at Microsoft where she was a Group Programming Manager for Microsoft.com, and later as web consultant, working for amazon.com, The Methow Conservancy, and Farming and the Environment.

BETHANY REID is the author of a poetry chapbook, The Coyotes and My Mom (1990), and the co-author, with Thomas M. Gaskin, of Everett and Snohomish County (Wyndham Press, 2005). Her poetry and essays have appeared in numerous small presses and literary journals, including Calyx, Santa Clara Review, Cairn, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, and Twins. Bethany earned her M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington where she was a poetry editor and later interview and essay editor of The Seattle Review.

Possession Sound Writers & EvCC Reads present:

Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Traveling Borders: Two Writers Explore the Boundaries of Truth and Fiction

Brenda Miller (Creative Non-Fiction)
Janet Trask Cox (Fiction)

Class Visit: Gray Wolf Hall 264, 5:00-6:00 pm
Reading: Jackson Center, 6:30-7:30 pm
Both events are free and open to the public

Brenda Miller is the author of Blessing of the Animals (EWU Press, 2009), which received the "bronze medal" in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award. She is also the author of the essay collection, Season of the Body (Sarabande Books, 2002), and co-author of Tell it Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2003). Her work has received five Pushcart Prizes and has been published in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, The Sun, Utne Reader, Georgia Review, Seneca Review, and Witness, among other journals. She is a Professor of English at Western Washington University and serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Bellingham Review.

Janet Trask Cox is a fiction writer who has lived in Italy, New York City, Montana and now Port Townsend, Wash. Before earning her Masters in Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington, she studied journalism, edited McCall Corporations fabric trade magazine for many years and owned and managed an advertising firm in Billings, Montana for 20 years. She has participated in various writers workshops and fellowships and was a finalist for the Dana Award for the Novel.

All readings free and open to the public.
For more info contact Kevin Craft
425-388-9395 or kcraft@everettcc.edu

 
Local Foods, Living Well
Panel Discussion & Reading
Tuesday, February 8, 12:00 – 1:00 pm
Baker 120, Everett Community College

  
Langdon Cook was a senior book editor at Amazon.com until he left the corporate world in 2004 to live in a cabin off the grid with his wife and son. He is the author of Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager (Skipstone 2009), and has written for numerous publications, including Gray's Sporting Journal, Outside, and Seattle Metropolitan. He is a graduate of the University of Washington's MFA program and a recipient of PEN Northwest's Margery Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. He lives in Seattle and forages widely in the Pacific Northwest. 
For more information, visit the Fat of the Land website: http://fat-of-the-land.blogspot.com/

Shannon Borg is a Seattle-based writer, editor, poet, and wine educator. She has written about travel, food, and wine for magazines, including Seattle, Northwest Palate, Wine Press Northwest, avalonwine.com, and citysearch.com. She is the author of Chefs on the Farm (Skipstone Press 2008).

This is a free event for EvCC students, employees and the community.  Join us!

For more information, email evccreads@everettcc.edu or call 425-388-9502
2010-2011 Reading Series

All readings free and open to the public.
For more info contact Kevin Craft
425-388-9395 or kcraft@everettcc.edu

Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Whitehorse Hall, 6:30-7:30 pm

Fall Reading: Three Writers, One Love

Possession Sound Writers is pleased to welcome to EvCC three writers who exemplify the love of writing and the discovery and practice of the writing life. The fall kick-off reading features fiction writer Angela Fountas, poet and children’s literature author Julie Larios, and poet and essayist Ed Skoog. Each of these writers has produced a distinguished body of work, and demonstrated a commitment, as teachers and mentors, to helping other writers find their way.

These three writers will read from their current work in the Public Art-Critique Space of Whitehorse Hall on Wednesday, November 10, 2010, from 6:30 – 7:30 pm. The reading is free and open to the public.

Fall Writers

Angela Fountas is a fiction writer, editor and producer of Write Habit (www.writehabit.org). She was awarded a 2009 Artist Trust Fellowship and was recently a writer-in-residence at Richard Hugo House. Her work has also been awarded grants from the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs and 4Culture, and has appeared in Fairy Tale Review, Quick Fiction, Diagram, Sentence, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama.

Julie Larios has had poetry published in The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, Threepenny Review, Field, McSweeney's and others, and has twice been selected for inclusion in The Best American Poetry (2006 and 2007.)  Recently some of her work was set to music and performed by the Five in a Line Group in New York City. In addition, her book of poetry for children, Yellow Elephant: A Bright Bestiary, won a Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor award. She is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts graduate creative writing program.

Ed Skoog is the author of Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, The New Republic, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and the fall issue of Poetry Northwest. He won the 2007 Lyric Poetry Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and has been awarded fellowships and residences from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Richard Hugo House, and George Washington University, and currently teaches composition at Everett Community College. He lives in Seattle.

Possession Sound Writers thanks the Everett CC Foundation for its generous support , without which our series would not be possible, much less free and open to the public.