I’m very excited to be part of the upcoming NW POETRY PUBLISHERS’ FORUM, featuring Northwest writers DAVID BIESPIEL, KIRSTEN RIAN, STEPHANIE LENOX, JEREMY HALINEN, DAVID HOROWITZ, and PAUL HUNTER. The evening is part of MIMI ALLIN’S ongoing poetry and performance art series at the Phinney Center in Seattle. I’ll be the ultimate fly on the wall with these great writers, serving as the evening’s facilitator.

Date: Feb 27th, 2009
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m.
Place: The Phinney Center
Cost: requested donation of $5-$10

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Untitled [Intersection] presents NW POETRY PUBLISHERS’ FORUM with guest moderator and literary journalist, DAVE JARECKI. Join us for a lively discussion about how we are manifesting the poetry of our times. Panelists include six accomplished poet/publishers from Washington and Oregon who will read from their work and contribute to a discussion about what they are doing to make poetry widespread, beautiful and affordable. This 2-hour event includes a wine & cheese reception. It is open to the public for a donation of $5-10. Untitled [Intersection] is a monthly performance art & poetry series curated by
A. K. “Mimi” Allin at The Phinney Center in the Greenwood section of Seattle. We hope you can join us!

PANELISTS:

DAVID BIESPIEL’s books of poetry include Shattering Air, Pilgrims & Beggars, & Wild Civility. A new book of poems, The Book of Men and Women, is due out in 2009. Among his honors are a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a Lannan Fellowship in poetry, & a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature. He has taught at Stanford, George Washington University, University of Maryland, & Portland State University, & he has been the Richard H. Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia. He currently divides his teaching among three universities: in the fall as the Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the spring as an Adjunct Professor at Oregon State University, & in the summer on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington. He’s a contributor to American Poetry Review, Parnassus, Poetry, Slate, The New York Times Book Review, & The New Republic. Since 2002 he has been the columnist on poetry for The Oregonian. In 2005 he was named editor of Poetry Northwest. In 2008, in line with his belief that poets be fully engaged with political and civic life, he became a contributor to Politico’s Arena, a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.

KIRSTEN RIAN’s poetry has appeared in national literary journals and anthologies, and was recently nominated for inclusion in the 2008 Best New Poets anthology. She leads workshops internationally, including locations like Sierra Leone and Finland, using poetry as a tool for literacy, healing, and storytelling within the refugee/immigrant and homeless communities. She resides in Portland, OR where she is a Poet-in-Residence through the Literary Arts Writers-in-the-Schools program. She co-authored with Sharon Wood Wortman the anthology, Walking Bridges Using Poetry as a Compass. Her anthology of Sierra Leonean poetry is forthcoming from Pika Press in 2009. She is poetry editor of the online literary journal, Writersdojo.org. Also an independent curator and writer, she has coordinated more than 375 exhibitions, and 65 books and catalogues.

STEPHANIE LENOX received an MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho and a BA in English from Whitworth University. Her work can be found in Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Seattle Review, and Washington Square, among others, and online in DIAGRAM and AGNI. The Heart That Lies Outside the Body, a chapbook of poems inspired by record holders, human superlatives, and ludicrous acts, won the 2007 Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2006, nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize, and published as a limited-edition broadside by the Center for Book Arts. She is a recipient of a grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She works as the promotions director at a children’s museum in Salem, Oregon, and edits the online literary journal Blood Orange Review.

JEREMY HALINEN is a poet and a coeditor and cofounder of Knockout Literary Magazine. Some of his recent poems appear in Arroyo Literary Review; Best Gay Poetry 2008;Dos Passos Review; Pontoon: an anthology of Washington State Poets, Number Ten; Quarter After Eight; and Rio Grande Review. Halinen holds an MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University, and he resides in Seattle.

DAVID D. HOROWITZ founded and manages Rose Alley Press, which primarily publishes books featuring Pacific Northwest rhymed metrical poetry. His new poetry collection, from Rose Alley Press, is Stars Beyond the Battlesmoke. Other collections, from Rose Alley, include Wildfire, Candleflame; Resin from the Rain; and Streetlamp, Treetop, Star. Many of his poems have been published in fine literary journals, such as The Lyric, Candelabrum, and The New Formalist. Some of his recent essays have appeared in Exterminating Angel and the IBPA Independent, a journal specializing in helping small press publishers. In 2005, David won the PoetsWest Achievement Award. In 2007, he edited, as well as published, the Rose Alley Press anthology: Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range. David gives frequent readings in and around Seattle, where he lives.

PAUL HUNTER has lent a hand where it was needed—whether as teacher, performer, grassroots arts activist, worker on the land, or shade-tree mechanic. For the past 14 years he has published fine letterpress poetry under the imprint of Wood Works, currently including 24 books and 60 broadsides. His poems have appeared in Alaska Fisherman’s Journal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bloomsbury Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Raven Chronicles, The Small Farmer’s Journal, The Southern Review and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in five full-length books and three chapbooks. His first collection of farming poems, Breaking Ground, 2004, from Silverfish Review Press, was reviewed in the New York Times, and received the 2004 Washington State Book Award. A second volume of farming poems, Ripening, was published in 2007, and a third companion volume, Come the Harvest, just appeared in 2008. He was recently a featured poet on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Tags: David Beispiel, David Horowitz, Jeremy Halinen, Kirsten Rian, Mimi Allin, Northwest poetry, NW Poetry Forum, Paul Hunter, poetry forum, Portland poetry, Portland poets, Stephanie Lenox, The Phinny Center

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 9:52 pm and is filed under announcements, poetry. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.