Group Poetry Reading Featuring Laura Read and Friends, Dresses From the Old Country

*Join us for this FREE Lit Live! event -- meet the author and get your book signed!*

Laura Read’s second poetry collection jumps back and forth in time to illuminate the identities of a life in progress: lost child, lonely adolescent, teacher, daughter, friend, wife, mother—a woman continuously shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. With an eye on gender issues, Read looks back at her childhood in the ’70s and ’80s as she observes how popular culture is shaping her sons’ lives today. Laura will be joined by Kami Westhoff, Maya Jewell Zeller, and Elizabeth Vignali.

Laura Read’s first collection of poems, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was published in 2012 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her second collection, Dresses from the Old Country, will be published by BOA in fall of 2018. She teaches English at Spokane Falls Community College. 

Kami Westhoff is the author of Sleepwalker, which won Minerva Rising's Dare to Be Contest in 2016, and Your Body a Bullet, a collaborative book written with Elizabeth Vignali forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. 

Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios, 2017), a collaboration with visual artist Carrie DeBacker; Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011; and Yesterday the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015). Maya has been the recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Writers Residency in the H.J. Andrews Forest, and a travel grant from the American Association of University Professors. She teaches for Central Washington University and lives in the Inland Northwest.

About Elizabeth Vignali, Bruce Beasley (Theophobia, Lord Brain) writes that “in poems of great tenderness and unflinching honesty, [she] emerges as a permanent figure among the new American poets.  After reading this book we are--like the pilgrim in its last poem--"darker, heavier than before, and smiling."” Elizabeth Vignali is an optician and writer. Her poems and stories have been published in various journals, including Menacing Hedge, Floating Bridge Review, Literary Mama, and Clover, A Literary Rag. Her chapbook, Object Permanence, is available from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Bellingham, Washington with her family.

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