Poet Kathleen Graber reads First Friday at the Richmond Public Library!

Brodie Herndon Poetry Series
7:00 pm

Join the Friends of the Library for the 2010 Brodie Herndon Poetry lectur at 7:00 pm on Friday, April 2. The program will be held in the Davenport Special Collections Room, lower level of the Main Library.

Kathleen Graber, author of Correspondence, and winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize is the 2010 speaker. A recipient of the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton (2007) and the Amy Lowell Travelling Scholarship (2008), Ms. Graber is an assistant professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. A second collection of poetry, The Eternal City, is forthcoming.

April is National Poetry Month

I have created a google grooup (by invitation only) to post a poem-a-day.

If you are interested-

2010 National Poetry Month Poems

Visit this group

I will send you five mini-poetry books for $5.

I will send you five mini-poetry books for $5.

What an interesting site this is...

guess we'll see if anyone bites.

A poet dies, a poem lives

posting from Avoiding the Muse

CONVERSATION


We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don't tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that's where I'm floating,
and that's what it's like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

--Ai (October 21, 1947 – March 20, 2010)

and another poet survives, facing death for her words

Help art6 Survive! Call for Entries!

Call for Entries: "Women and Words"


A juried show at art6 Gallery for the month of April as part of MINDS WIDE OPEN: Virginia Celebrates Women in the Arts 2010. Curated by Shann Palmer.

Women artists and writers are encouraged to submit (in collaboration or individually) for this exhibit. Works must include text as part of the work. All media will be considered, though two-dimensional work will be favored for this particular show as we have limited areas for pedestals.

Size should be under 4 by 4 feet, please inquire before bringing or mailing anything larger. If a work is mailed, please include return postage if it is not selected or does not sell. Up to two pieces per artist will be considered.

The entry fee is as follows: $10.00 per piece for Art6 gallery members, $15.00 per piece for non-members. (Collaborators may send an additional piece each or another collaboration with a fee).

There is room for a few works by men about women (or women's words), but this is primarily an exhibit for women. All rules apply to men as written below.

We encourage you to price your work to sell, you will receive 70% of the selling fee, the gallery 30%. You may donate part or all of the proceeds to the gallery if you would like to help our gallery stay open, but this will not impact whether or not your piece is accepted.

We will accept work March 20th and March 27th during our Saturday hours 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.. Please call to make an appointment on other days- DO NOT COME TO THE GALLERY WITHOUT AN APPOINTMENT ON OTHER DAYS. Call 804-343-1406, email at art6ebroad@gmail.com or contact Shann Palmer at 804-335-9403 to make an appointment or with questions.

The show runs from Friday April 2, 2010(opening night) through Saturday April 24, 2010. Works Must be picked up Sunday,April 25th during the hours of 2:30 to 4p.m. The gallery will not be responsible for works left after that date unless other arrangements have been made in advance with Shann

Poetry at VCU- Linda Bierds

Acclaimed Poet Linda Bierds Reads at VCU
March 11, 2010 at 8:00 pm
VCU Harris Hall Auditorium
1015 Floyd Avenue

The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by acclaimed poet, Linda Bierds. The reading will take place on Thursday, March 11, at 8 pm at the VCU Harris Hall Auditorium (1015 Floyd Avenue - PLEASE NOTE, THIS IS A VENUE CHANGE FROM THE PREVIOUS ANNOUNCEMENT).
Bierds has published eight books of poetry: Flights of the Harvest-Mare; The Stillness, the Dancing; Heart and Perimeter; The Ghost Trio (a 1994 Notable Book selection of the American Library Association); The Profile Makers (winner of the Pen West Poetry Prize); The Seconds; First Hand and Flight: New and Selected Poems (Putnam 2008) Her awards include four Pushcart Prizes, the Virginia Quarterly Review's 2005 Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill, the Guggenheim, and the MacArthur foundations, and twice from the NEA. She is a professor of English at the University of Washington.

Ms. Bierds will also be available for an open Q&A session at 4PM that Thursday afternoon at 4Pm in Hibbs Hall room 308. This session is free and open to the public.

This reading at VCU is one of several events for the Spring of 2010 sponsored by the VCU Department of English and the Graduate Writers Association. It is free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact (804) 828-1329.

Sorry I'm going to miss this- I'll be at a rehearsal! But YOU should go!

Poetry Wednesday night at the Library of Virginia!

2010 Series Kicks Off with Poets Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber


RICHMOND, VA – The Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Blackbird/New Virginia Review, the Library of Virginia and Chop Suey Books present the first installment in the 2010 Fresh Ink literary series on Wednesday, March 3. The on-going series of readings by emerging authors continues with a chapbook festival and a fiction reading later in the year. Poets Jake Adam York and Kathleen Graber read from their work beginning at 6 p.m. at the Library of Virginia. The reading is free and open to the public.
Jake Adam York is the author of three books of poems: Murder Ballads (2005); A Murmuration of Starlings (2008); and Persons Unknown (2010), forthcoming in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry as an editor’s selection. His work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart Prize and has placed in numerous competitions. York’s poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Oxford American, Greensboro Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily, and other journals. His work of poetic history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry, was published by Routledge in 2005. York is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where he directs an undergraduate Creative Writing program and produces Copper Nickel with his students. York is also a contributing editor for Shenandoah, a co-editor of the online journal storySouth, and a founding editor of the electronic journal Thicket.

Kathleen Graber’s first collection of poetry, Correspondence, was the winner of the 2005 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She was the 2007 Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University and the 2008 Amy Lowell Traveling Scholar. She is a member of the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University, and her new collection of poems, The Eternal City, is forthcoming this summer from Princeton University Press. Poems from the new book are forthcoming this spring in Blackbird, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and AGNI.

Fresh Ink is supported in part by the Carole Weinstein Endowment for Creative Writing at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond.