Poetry Reading and Signing for Fire in the Pasture: 21st century Mormon Poets

Poetry Reading and Signing for Fire in the Pasture: 21st century Mormon Poets

Saturday, Feb 25, 2012

Location:
Ken Sanders Rare Books

Ken Sanders Rare Books is pleased to announce a group poetry reading and signing for Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets. The event will feature fourteen poets from the book at 7pm on Saturday, February 25th at our downtown Salt Lake City bookstore, 268 South 200 East. Copies of Fire in the Pasture (paperback, $27.99) will be available for purchase and signing at the event. This event is free and open to the public.

Fire in the Pasture compiles the work of dozens of contemporary Mormon poets into a single volume, in the tradition of past compilations such as 1989’s Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems. The range and scope of the collection is astonishing, and provides a very thorough introduction to the world of modern Mormon poetry. “You’ll find a range of published and unpublished work from eighty-two poets…all of these represent the varieties of the contemporary lyric voice; and the range of poets speaking here represents the varieties of the contemporary Mormon experience—a chorus of voices that calls again and again for us to reconsider our relationship to poetry, to the modern world, and to 21st-century Mormonism” –Tyler Chadwick, from the preface.

Editor Tyler Chadwick will emcee the event, which will include poets Laura Baxter, Lisa Bickmore, Marie Brian, Alex Caldiero, Danielle Dubrasky, Sarah Duffy, Michael Hicks, E.S. (Sarah) Jenkins, Alan Mitchell, Elizabeth Pinborough, Holly Welker, Terresa Wellborn, and Sunni Wilkinson.

A special note about Paul Swenson: longtime Salt Lake City resident, writer, journalist, poet, friend, and mentor Paul Swenson passed away on January 26th. Paul was planning to participate in this event, and we will miss his presence.

Biographical information about the poets is detailed below. For more information, please contact:

Ken Sanders Rare Books 268 South 200 East Salt Lake City, UT 84111 801-521-3819 books@dreamgarden.com www.kensandersbooks.com

Biographical info about the poets:

Laura Nielson Baxter was born and raised in Utah County and loves the people who live there despite all their quirks. She received her BA in English with emphases in Literary Studies and Creative Writing as well as a degree in Art from Utah Valley University. She has a passion for all things art, enjoys the outdoors, and loves having adventures with the most awesome husband ever invented, Kirk. Laura regularly shares many projects, including her poetry, on her blog, lauranielsonbaxter.blogspot.com.

Lisa Bickmore’s work has appeared in Quarterly West, Tar River Poetry, Caketrain, and elsewhere. Her book, Haste, was published by Signature Books in 1994. She teaches writing in Salt Lake City.

Marie Brian lives in Woodland Hills, Utah, with her husband and three kids. She spends her time generating awkward moments with her family, reading lowbrow literature, and creating subversive embroidery in the name of her online pseudonym, The Cotton Floozy.

Polyartist, sonosopher, and scholar of humanities, Alex Caldiero makes things that appear as language or images or music, and then again as the shape of your own mind. Caldiero is the author of numerous publications, visual and text-sound works, including Body/Dreams/Organs (Elik Press, 2005), Poetry is Wanted Here! (Dream Garden Press, 2010), and Sound Weave, a poetry-music CD with Theta Naught (Differential Records, 2006). He is featured inDictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Routledge, London/NY) and is the subject of the experimental documentary The Sonosopher: Caldiero in life…in Sound. Alex is Poet/Artist-in-Residence at Utah Valley University.

Tyler Chadwick lives in Pocatello, Idaho, with his wife, Jessica, and their four daughters. His poems have appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome, Black Rock & Sage, Wilderness Interface Zone, and Victorian Violet Press Poetry Journal. In 2009, he received the Ford Swetnam Poetry Prize and in 2010 he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is the editor of Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-first Century Mormon Poets (Peculiar Pages, 2011).

Danielle Beazer Dubrasky has received a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship. Her manuscript, Drift Migrations, was a finalist for the 2010 White Pines Press Poetry Prize. She also received the 2006 Utah Arts Council First Place Award for a book-length collection of poems. Her poetry has been published in ECOllective, Tar River Poetry, Weber Studies, CityArts, Petroglyph, Irreantum, and Dialogue. Her publications include Persephone Awakened (a poetry chapbook). She teaches creative writing at Southern Utah University.

Sarah Duffy was born in New York City on January 18, 1978. Spending most of her youth between New York and Southern California, she eventually moved to Utah in 1997 and graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA in English in 2011. She currently resides in Provo, Utah, and works for a non-profit organization. Her poetry has appeared in Inscape and Tar River Poetry. Her favorite poets are constantly changing, but more recently they include Li-Young Lee, Jay Hopler, and Jane Hirshfield—to name a few of many.

Michael Hicks is Professor of Music at Brigham Young University. Author of four historical books for University of Illinois Press, he has just completed four years as editor of the journal American Music. His poetry has been published in Dialogue, BYU Studies, Literature and Belief, Sunstone, and in the recent anthologies Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses and New Poets of the American West.

E.S. (Sarah) Jenkins received her MA in English from Brigham Young University in 2008. After writing a thesis on contemporary American poetry, she turned her attention to writing contemporary American poetry, completing an MFA at Northwestern University in 2011.

Alan Rex Mitchell was raised in rural Oregon and educated at Utah State University and the University of California Riverside. His numerous scientific journal articles, reports, and columns have been concerned with theoretical and practical agro-environmental practices. He is recovering from having worked for Universities, state, and federal agencies, and is now politically libertarian, culturally omnivorous, and philosophically anti-nihilist. His missionary novel, Angel of the Danube (Cedar Fort, 2000), prompted Richard H. Cracroft to call him the Mormon Saul Bellow. In addition to poetry, he has written about religion and economics, and started a publishing company, Greenjacket Books. He lives with his wife and occasional children in the wilderness of Utah’s west desert.

Elizabeth Pinborough is a BYU alumna and graduated with her master’s degree in religion and literature from Yale University in May 2011. Art is her greatest love, and she spends her happiest hours drawing, painting, photographing, and writing creatively. Women’s history captivates her, and she comes from a line of strong, faithful women. She is a member of the Exponent II staff and is a contributor to the Mormon Women Project.

Holly Welker was born and raised in southeastern Arizona, the descendant of dour Mormon pioneers who moved south from the Great Salt Lake Valley shortly after arriving in it. Having relocated to Salt Lake City a few years ago, she is surprised at how much she loves the city. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona and a PhD in contemporary American literature from the University of Iowa. Her poetry and prose have appeared in such publications as Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, Bitch, Black Warrior Review, The Cream City Review, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Gargoyle, The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Image, The Iowa Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Other Voices, New York Times, PMS, Poetry International, Poetry Northwest, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Sunstone and TriQuarterly.

Terresa Wellborn is a bricoleur, librarian, and cartographer of words. She is fond of the color blue, rock gardens, and chocolate chip waffles. She has a BA in English Literature from Brigham Young University and a MLIS degree from San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared in Segullah and is forthcoming in Monsters and Mormons and Inscape. She is writing her way to a book.

Born and raised in Cache Valley, Sunni Brown Wilkinson currently teaches English and writing at Weber State University. She received an MFA from Eastern Washington University. Her work has been published in Red Rock Review, Tar River Poetry, Southern Indiana Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West, among other publications. She lives and gardens in Ogden and loves hiking the trails there with her husband and sons.