Writers and Ideas Reading Spring Series

ALL READINGS at YVCC in the PARKER ROOM, DECCIO BUILDING, Beginning at 730pm
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April 3rd: Gayle Kaune has published widely in literary magazines including Willow Springs, Seattle Review, Greenfield Review, Centennial Review and South Florida Poetry Review. Her poems have won several Washington Poets’ Association Awards, the Ben Hur Lampman Prize and been nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her chapbook, Concentric Circles, won the Flume Press award and her book, Still Life in the Physical World is available from Blue Begonia Press. Gayle has recently relocated from the Eastern Washington desert to Port Townsend, WA.

April 17th: Charles Potts has had a dozen books of poetry published since 1996, the most recent: The Portable Potts from Albuquerque’s West End Press in 2005. Other new titles still in print include three from Blue Begonia Press in Yakima: Kiot: Selected Early Poems, 1963-1977, Lost River Mountain and Slash & Burn; Across the North Pacific from Slough Press; a reprint of Little Lord Shiva: The Berkeley Poems, 1968, from Glass Eye Books; and Nature Lovers from Pleasure Boat Studio. Other books in print include How the South Finally Won the Civil War: And Controls the Political Future of the United States.


May 1st: Judith Skillman is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Eric Mathieu King Fund from the Academy of American Poets for her book “Storm,” Blue Begonia Press, 1998. Grants include a Writer’s Fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission, a publication prize and public arts grant from the King County Arts Commission. Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Poetry, Southern Review, Seneca Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Journal of the American Medical Association, Fiberarts, Northwest Review, and many other journals. Skillman’s “Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986 – 2006 “ was published in early 2006 by Silverfish Review Press. “Coppelia, Certain Digressions,” is due out in the fall of 2006 from David Robert Books. Skillman is a Faculty Member at City University in Bellevue, Washington.

May 15th: Editors, Weathered Pages Anthology, Jim Bodeen, Terry Martin, and Rob Prout. A six-foot cedar post, the word POETRY carved on both the east and west sides, planted in a garden on a street corner in Yakima, Washington, pushpins stuck in the wood. For ten years, hundreds of people have pinned thousands of poems to the Poetry Pole at Blue Begonia Press. Weathered Pages is a sampling of the work of those who have used the Poetry Pole as a source of inspiration.

After time in the weather, the pages have been taken down and saved—until now. Poems collected here represent a decade of testimony pinned and flying from a cedar post planted in a garden. They may trigger what you're looking for in your own life. There is room on the Poetry Pole for everybody.

May 30th: Lynn Martin “Arising from a sequence of great losses, Lynn Martin’s poems walk straight into the deepest sorrow. There, face to face with the most terrifying state of not knowing, they expand outward to the farthest rim of affirmation—where the blue bowl holds everything.” —Noelle Oxenhandler, Essayist, The New Yorker