A book launch, poetry reading, and musical event to celebrate Laura Read's award-winning new poetry collection, But She Is Also Jane.
Friday, May 19th at 6:30pm at Central Library (906 W Main Ave) in the nxʷyxʷyetkʷ Hall.
Revered local poet and SFCC professor Laura Read will read from her thrilling new poetry collection, But She Is Also Jane, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Musicians Caridwen Irvine-Spatz and Greg Spatz will perform, as well as poets Kathryn Smith and Maya Jewell Zeller. Kathryn Smith will also present her artwork and poetry broadsides.
Auntie's Books will be in attendance to sell copies of the poetry collection.
About But She Is Also Jane
Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women’s lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches middle age, she copes with the loss of loved ones, the realities of an emptying nest, the routine indignities of sexism, and nostalgia for the past. Laura Read’s third poetry collection balances discussions of Degas, Vermeer, and Marie Curie with reflections on Sammy Hagar, a troubling outing to a male revue, and memories of watching Mork and Mindy on the night of her mother’s hysterectomy.
About Laura Read
Laura Read is author of Dresses from the Old Country, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, and the chapbook, The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You. She served as poet laureate for Spokane, Washington, from 2015 to 2017 and teaches at Spokane Falls Community College and the Eastern Washington University MFA program in creative writing.
About Kathryn Smith
Kathryn Smith is the author of Self-Portrait with Cephalopod, as well as the collection Book of Exodus and the chapbook Chosen Companions of the Goblin, winner of the 2018 Open Country Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Bellingham Review, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Redivider, and elsewhere, and she has received an Allied Arts Foundation award, a Spokane Arts Grant Award, and a Pushcart Special Mention. She received her MFA in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and lives in Spokane, Washington, where she also makes collage and mixed media art.
About Maya Jewell Zeller
Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy For Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the poetry collection Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011); as well as co-editor, with Sharma Shields, of the anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales and Fables from the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Maya’s prose appears in such places as The Rumpus, Brevity, Bellingham Review, and Booth Journal. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation as well as a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work internationally at the University of Oxford and in Madrid at the Unamuno Author Festival. Currently, she is Associate Professor of English for Central Washington University, Affiliate Faculty for Western Colorado’s low-residency MFA, and Poetry Editor for Scablands Books. Her WIPs are a memoir called “Raised by Ferns,” as well as an academic textbook, “Advanced Poetry: A Craft Guide and Anthology,” under contract with Bloomsbury (UK). Find Maya on Twitter @MayaJZeller.
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Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women’s lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches middle age, she copes with the loss of loved ones, the realities of an emptying nest, the routine indignities of sexism, and nostalgia for the past.
A 2022 Washington State Book Award finalist
Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod--selected by francine j.
(Please note: This book cannot be returned.)
Poetry. In language poet Laurie Lamon calls both spare and sumptuous, BOOK OF EXODUS narrates the imagined experiences of a Russian family who lived for 40 years in the Siberian taiga, utterly isolated from society.
(Please note: This book cannot be returned.)
Poetry. Women's Studies. Ecopoetics. ALCHEMY FOR CELLS & OTHER BEASTS charts a course into magical waters, anchoring itself in the frightening politicization of a woman's body.
"Maya Zeller's American Northwest is a land of verdant sensuality, insistent yet fragile and intimate as it was in the eyes of Roethke, storied in mossy and weathered details, human ruin and hard won grace as it was in the heart of Kesey. With extraordinary veracity and empathy she inhabits the body and emerging consciousness of a girl and young woman alive to the lives around her.