Workshop 4:30 to 6:00PM
Reading and Open Mic: 6:15 to 8:00PM – Peter Ludwin and Sybil James
Our Workshop (at 4:30PM) will be led by award-winning writer/poet Peter Ludwin. Topic: ‘Donning a mask: Exploring the persona poem.’ We'll go over examples of persona poems, discuss their advantages, when we might consider using them, and we will also write one.
6:15PM PoetryIsEverything Reading and open mic. Our guest features are Peter Ludwin and Sybil James!
This event is FREE!
Saturday March 17th, 2018
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Author Bios
PETER LUDWIN
Peter Ludwin is the recipient of a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust and the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry. His first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker Press. His second collection is Rumors of Fallible Gods (2013 Presa Press), was a two-time finalist for the Gival Press Poetry Award that was published.
His latest, Gone to Gold Mountain, (2016 by MoonPath Press) was nominated for a Washington State Book Award and in May, 2017 the Before Columbus Foundation nominated it for an American Book Award.
A fourteen-year participant in Mexico’s San Miguel Poetry Week, Peter has studied under such noted poets as Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, Joseph Stroud and Robert Wrigley, Ludwin was the Second Prize winner of the 2007-2008 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards. In 2010 Soundings Review named him its Reader’s Choice winner in the spring/summer issue.
Most recently, he was the 2016 First Prize winner of The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, the Second Place winner of the 2016 Paulann Petersen Poetry Award, and a finalist in poetry for both the 2016 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and the Pangaea Poetry Prize. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, he received nominations in 2016 from MoonPath Press and Connecticut River Review.
His work has appeared in many journals, including Atlanta Review, The Bitter Oleander, The Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, North American Review and Prairie Schooner, to name a few. A world traveler who has journeyed by canoe to visit remote Indian families in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador, hiked in the Peruvian Andes, thumbed for rides in Greece, bargained for goods in the markets of Marrakech and Istanbul and survived debilitating illness in China and Tibet, he is also accomplished on acoustic guitar and autoharp. He lives in Kent, Washington, where he works
for the Parks Department.
SYBIL JAMES
Sibyl James is the author of twelve books--poetry, fiction and travel memoirs--including 'In China with Harpo and Karl' (Calyx Books), 'The Adventures of Stout Mama'' (Papier-Mache Press), 'China Beats' (Egress Studio Press), 'The Grand Piano Range' (Black Heron Press) and, most recently, 'Hard Goods & Hot Platters' (Last Word Press). She has taught at colleges in the U.S., China, Mexico, and--as Fulbright professor--Tunisia and Cote d'Ivoire. Her writing has received awards from Artist Trust and the Seattle, King County and Washington State arts commissions.
The "range" of the poems in Sibyl James', The Grand Piano Range, is not only geographic, but also political and personal. Geographically, many of the poems are grounded in the Pacific Northwest of the United States: Alaska, Oregon, and most often Washington, where James has been a longtime resident. Like another Washington-based poet, Richard Hugo, James is interested in the back roads, small towns, and good bars where a waitress "shares Wild Turkey on the house" and a neighbor is the guy who takes your shift the night your baby's born.
But this range extends beyond the Pacific Northwest with poems powered by political investigations. They protest the loss of squatter's rights in Appalachia. They speak of both the exuberance of Pele, goddess of volcanoes in Hawaii and the privations experienced by Chinese laborers there. They recount the disasters of the civil wars and U.S. complicity in them that ravaged Central America in the 1980s. Closer to home, there are poems that confront the American gap between rich and poor.
Of course, the personal is political, but in this collection they often clearly coincide. There are plenty of love poems here, but almost always embedded in larger contexts. The invitation of "Going Places" includes tramps on a train; "Blue Herons" pictures a wife watching her Spanish husband's military remembrance of marches; "Intersection" is the Platonic love of a Jewish tailor who wants to make a coat to protect his American client from pain.
Overall, this collection makes both a lyric and narrative account of the late twentieth century from a specific American point of view.