POETS AT CORNUCOPIA DAYS (Kent, WA) Saturday, July 11

The Northwest Renaissance presents: POETS @ CORNUCOPIA DAYS 2 p.m. Saturday, July 11 Kent Centennial Center 400 West Gowe Featuring Jeff Lair • Susan Landgraf Casey Fuller • Carolyn Maddux ~ & a poetry game with prizes! ~ Celebrating 25 years of poetry in Kent Produced with generous support from the Kent Arts Commission -------------- The Northwest RenaissancePoets, Performers & Publisher CONTACT: Marjorie.Rommel@gmail.com, 253/939-0571 Celebrating 25 years of City-supported poetry in Kent, The Northwest Renaissance presents POETS @ CORNUCOPIA DAYS 2-4 p.m. Saturday, July 11, in the Kent Centennial Center, 400 West Gowe. The program will include readings by four well-published Northwest poets, audience participation games and prizes, and free broadsides featuring poems by each of this year’s readers: Jeff Lair, Susan Landgraf, Casey Fuller, and Carolyn Maddux. Jeff Lair lives and raises chickens in Everett. His poetry is unambiguous, frank, and often surprising in its serious consideration of disillusionment, epiphanies of bewilderment, and death –– always with enough irony to make you laugh. His illustrated books of poems are Bucking and Braying at the Dark Edge, and Tall Grass. Writer/photographer Susan Landgraf’s chapbook Other Voices was published this summer by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod, Rattle, The Laurel Review, Third Coast Review, Pikeville Review, Interim, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Poetry Review, and The Aurorean, among others. Honors include a Fulbright-Hays grant to travel and study in South Africa and Namibia; awards from the Pablo Neruda Society, Society of Humanistic Anthropology, and Academy of American Poets; residencies at Hedgebrook, Ragdale, Soapstone, and the Willard R. Espy Foundation compound in Oysterville, Washington; and a Theodore Morrison scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. She was awarded an NEH grant to spend five weeks in Peru and Bolivia studying the “Andean Worlds” in 2005, and in 2007 she received a Jack Straw Productions production grant. A former journalist, she taught at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China in 2002 and 2008 through an exchange program with Highline Community College where she teaches writing, literature, and media classes. Casey Fuller lives in a small studio apartment in downtown Olympia, Washington. He works in warehouse and has lots of tattooes. He has been a board member for the Olympia Poetry Network for more than five years and has helped organize roughly 60 poetry readings and 30 poetry workshops. His work has appeared in Switched-on Gutenberg, In Tahoma's Shadow, and Palabra. He received The City of Olympia's Here Today public arts grant in 2009 to create book of photos and poems entitled, What's Being Sent. In August, he will earn his MFA in creative writing from Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop. Then, he says, he’s going to rest. Carolyn Maddux is a more-or-less retired journalist who teaches creative writing at Olympic College Shelton and sells antiques in downtown Shelton. Her two books are Remembering Water from Bellowing Ark Press and a letterpress chapbook, Voluntary on a Flight of Angels, printed as a benefit for Hypatia-in-the-Woods, a retreat and resource center for women in the arts. Her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Salal, Crab Creek Review and elsewhere. This program is made possible by generous assistance from the Kent Arts Commission, which has supported poetry in Kent for more than 25 years. The Northwest Renaissance is a nonprofit coalition of Puget Sound-area poets and writers that has produced poetry readings and workshops in many venues since the mid-60s. The organization published an annual chapbook anthology of poems by featured readers as part of its programs at the Kent Canterbury Faire, and now offers a series of free poetry broadsides at Cornucopia Days. The group also has published other anthologies, including Tablets the Rain Inscribes, On the Eighth Day, Pisces, and this year, Jump Start, a collection of poems by established Northwest poets who led workshops for NWR at Highline Community College over a period of 10 years. For more information, contact Marjorie.Rommel@gmail.com.