Appearances in conjunction with the release of his new novel, Clara and Merritt, published by Wordcraft of Oregon, LLC. Release date: June 1, 2010.

Appearances:

Wednesday, June 9, 7:30 p.m. Blue Mountain Writers Series, La Grande Public Library, La Grande, OR 

Thursday, June 10, 7:00 p.m., Annie Bloom’s Books, Multnomah Village, OR

Friday, June 11, 7:00 p.m., Powell’s City of Books (Burnside), Portland, OR

Saturday, June 12, 3:15 p.m., Pacific Northwest Labor History Association Conference, Portland, OR

Thursday, July 8, 7:00 p.m., Orca Books, Olympia, WA

Sunday, July 11, 3:00 p.m., Eagle Harbor Books (Winslow), Bainbridge Island, WA

Monday, July 12, 2:00 p.m., Freeland Public Library, Whidbey Island, WA (Sponsored by The Bookbay)

Tuesday, July 13, 7:00 p.m., Third Place Books (Lake Forest Park), Seattle, WA

Friday, July 16, 7:00 p.m., Elliott Bay Book Company (Capitol Hill), Seattle, WA

Monday, July 19, 7:00 p.m., University Books (U District), Seattle, WA

Tuesday, July 20, 7:00 p.m., Riverwalk Books, Chelan, WA

Thursday, July 22, 7:00 p.m., Parkplace Books, Kirkland, WA

The 2009 Washington State Book Awards have been announced. This is the 43rd year for the award which is given to a book based on the strength of the publication’s literary merit, lasting importance and overall quality. It was formerly called the Governor’s Writers Awards.

White Jade and Other Stories by Alex Kuo was a finalist in the fiction category.

All About Lulu, Jonathan Evison won the fiction award.

Other finalists were:

Guernica, Dave Boling

Oxygen, Carol Casselia

The Other, David Guterson

The 2009 Washington State Book Awards are sponsored by the Washington Center for the Book at the Seattle Public Library. Authors will be honored at a public ceremony at 7 p.m. Wednesday, October 14th, at a public ceremony at the Seattle Public Library, at the Central Library branch, in the Microsoft Auditorium. The event, which is presented in partnership with the Elliott Bay Book Co., will feature remarks and readings by the award recipients. Books will be available for purchase and a reception and book signing will follow the program.

Wordcraft of Oregon is proud to announce that Leslie What’s story collection, Crazy Love, was named a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in fiction (the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction).

Other finalists were:

Miriam Gershow, The Local News (Spiegel & Grau)

Gina Ochsner, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (Portobello Books)

Barbara Pope, Cezanne’s Quarry (Pegasus Books)

Jon Raymond, Livability: Stories (Bloomsbury)

The fiction this year was judged by Robert Olmstead. The winner will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards ceremony, which takes place Monday, October 26, 2009 at the Gerding Theater at the Armory. Tom Bissell will hose and tickets aare available at www.brownpapertickets.com

Congratulations to all the finalists. More information on finalists for other categories can be found at the Literary Arts, Inc. website www.literary-arts.org and www.paperfort.blogsppot.com

The July reading in Stayton’s Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings, to be held Sunday, July 12, will feature a poet from western Oregon, Margaret Chula of Portland, and one from eastern, David Memmott of La Grande, both reading from unusual new books and, as part of the series’ continuing celebration of Oregon’s sesquicentennial, from past or elder Oregon poets who have influenced them. The reading will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. in the studio of artist Paul Toews at 349 N. Third Ave., where it shares space with the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore. Admission will be free; donations are appreciated. Books by both featured poets will be for sale at the reading, and they will sign copies. Audience members are invited to bring one or two short poems to share during an open part of the reading.

Margaret Chula will read poems in the voices of Japanese Americans in World War II internment camps—poems written in a cross-arts collaboration with quilt artist Cathy Erickson. These poems are collected, and the corresponding quilts by Erickson are beautifully reproduced, in their book What Remains: Japanese Americans in Internment Camps, just released by Katsura Press. The book also contains historical photos and texts, as well as accounts by Chula and Erickson of the inspiration and process from which their works emerged. Chula is steeped in Japanese culture, having lived for 12 years in Kyoto, where she studied the Japanese traditional arts of woodblock printing and flower arranging, as well as teaching creative writing. Her work in the Japanese poetic forms of haiku and tanka has garnered many awards and is collected in several earlier books—Grinding My Ink (1993), This Moment (1995), Always Filling, Always Full (2001), The Smell of Rust (2003). She also co-authored, with Rich Youmans, a collection of linked haibun, Shadow Lines (2000). With the support of grants from Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, she has worked collaboratively with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.

David Memmott will be reading from Giving It Away, a comprehensive collection of poems written over many years, published this spring by Wordcraft of Oregon. The book’s cover art is a swirling and colorful digital work by the poet, and black and white digital pieces by him serve as frontispieces for each of the book’s eight parts. Included within those parts are poems of family, and poems of place, political poems and environmental poems, lyric poems and long narrative poems, all reflecting an expansive vision. Memmott writes and publishes both poetry and fiction, including speculative as well as realistic works. Recent work includes a chapbook of poems, Watermarked (Traprock Books, 2004); a short story collection, Shadow Bones, and a postcyberpunk novel, Primetime. Poems and stories appear in both mainstream and genre magazines and anthologies, and his speculative work has been recognized with a Rhysling Award. Memmott is editor and publisher of Wordcraft of Oregon, which has been awarded three fellowships from Literary Arts.

Now in its eighth year, Stayton’s Second Sunday Series of Poetry Readings is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Marion Cultural Development Corporation, which also provides funding for donation of featured poets’ books to the Stayton Public Library. The July 12th reading will be the last of this season. There will be no reading in August, when the series takes its annual summer vacation. Monthly readings will resume in September. For more information, contact series coordinator Eleanor Berry at 503-859-3045 or eberry@wvi.com.

Crossing the Blues Writing Events

Sponsored by the Blue Mountain Writers, La Grande, OR

August 23, 2008

Colleen Johnson Community Room, La Grande Public Library 10 AM – 4 PM

Location! Location! Location! We all have stories of place worth telling—of stirring events, of unique and beautiful landscapes, of conversations in passing outside a favorite downtown shop or eatery. Crossing the Blues writing events celebrate local stories.

Authors’ Fair 10 AM – 4 PM: Local authors will sell and sign their books, and writers’ groups, magazines, book publishers, and others providing resources to those interested in publishing will display their resources. Authors and others wishing to participate should contact David Memmott at dsmemmott@verizon.net.

Union County Oral History Project 10 AM – noon: Kids and adults can participate in the local oral history project by telling or writing stories about living in the region and/or providing photographs to be scanned into the collection.

Writing Marathon noon – 2 PM: Writers of all ages are invited to wander downtown La Grande, stopping at festival seating or at local eateries to write and share writing. Interested participants will meet at the Community Room at noon, divide into small groups, and venture into the city. The first 25 participants will receive free T-shirts.

Open Mic 2 PM – 4 PM: Local writers are invited to join Union County Poetry Contest winners to read from their work. Come to read finished work, to share writing in progress, and/or to enjoy the readings.

For more information or to volunteer, please contact:

Nancy Knowles

Department of English/Writing

Eastern Oregon University

1 University Blvd.

La Grande, OR 97850

nknowles@eou.edu

(541) 962-3795

Assistance Needed

The BMW discussed the following additions to the day. To make these happen, we need volunteers to work on them:

 Table at the Farmers’ Market advertising the Community Room events and perhaps presenting an activity like poetry on demand

 Poetry trees

 Free poetry

 A place to post poetry and other writing

George Venn will be doing a Powerpoint presentation to the Pacific Northwest American Studies Conference in Walla Walla, Washington, on Friday, April 11. He will be available after the presentation to sign copies of his book, Solder to Advocate.

Poet Pamela Steele will read from her new book, “Paper Bird,” at 7 p.m. Friday, April 11, at Washington State University
Tri-Cities.

The poetry reading is part of the Spring 2008 Liberal Arts Season of Events. It is in the WSU Tri-Cities East Building Auditorium, 2710 University Drive, Richland. Admission is free and open to the public.

A reading/release party will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the La Grande Public Library to celebrate the publication of Matt Schumacher’s poetry collection, Spilling the Moon. The reading is free and open to the public and sponsored by the RondeHouse Media Arts Konsortium and La Grande Public Library. Refreshments will be served. For more information on Matt and the book, please go to our main page:  http://www.wordcraftoforegon.com

Two poetry workshops and a reading offered with Kentucky poets, Lynnell Edwards and Nickole Brown at Fishtrap, The Coffin House/400 E. Main/Enterprise, Oregon

March 15, 2008,

9:00 a.m. — noon: Beyond the Lyric “I”: Wellsprings for Poems Outside the Self,  Lynnell Edwards

This generative craft workshop will engage students with wellsprings for poetry, including myth, history, literature, folklore, and current events, that find their energies beyond the immediate experience of personal memory.

1:30 — 4:30:  Indie Publishing 101:  a behind-the-scenes look at literary publishing, Nickole Brown

What should one expect from an independent publisher?  And how does the fact that a press is nonprofit effect their abilities? What is the best way to submit a manuscript?

Each three-hour workshop is $20; the two workshops for $35. Maximum of 15 in monring workshop; 20 in aftrnoon workshop.

7:00 p.m.  Poetry Reading with Nickole Brown and Lynnell Edwards

Free and open to the public.

For more information, contact Zanni Schauffler at Fishtrap: 426-3623 / zanni@fishtrap.org/

Thanks to Wordcraft of Oregon author, Pamela Steele, two Kentucky poets will be visiting Northeast Oregon in March. They will be reading in La Grande at Wee Mama’s Sandwich Shoppe at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 14^th and on Saturday afternoon at Coffin House in Enterprise.   

Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, published by Red Hen in September 2007. She graduated from the M.F.A. Program for Creative Writing at Vermont College. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. Her work has been featured in The Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Diagram Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Mammoth Books’ Sudden Stories anthology, and Starcherone Press anthology PP / FF.  She also co-edited the anthology, Air Fare: Stories, Poems, & Essays on Flight.  She has served as the National Publicity Consultant for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and as the Program Coordinator for the Union Institute & University writing residency in Slovenia.  Nickole has worked at Louisville’s nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books for eight years.

 Lynnell Major Edwards is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, and The Highwayman’s Wife  and The Farmer’s Daughter,  (Red Hen Press, 2007, 2003). Her work has appeared on Verse Daily and in numerous literary journals including: Poems & Plays, Southern Poetry Review, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry East, and Dos Passos Review. She is a regular reviewer for The Georgia Review, Pleiades, and Rain Taxi. She lives in Louisville, Kentucky where she teaches writing and literature courses at the University of Louisville. She received her doctorate in English at the University of Louisville, her undergraduate degree at Centre College in Kentucky, and is the recipient of a 2007 Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She is also associate director of InKY, inc. a non-profit literary arts organization which sponsors the monthly InKY reading series in Louisville, Ky. For more information and contact: http://www.lynnelledwards.com