Face to Meet the Faces Reading
I don’t know why, but every time I walk into the Richard Hugo House lately, I get a good feeling. I’ve been loving their Cheap Wine and Poetry series (much rowdier and hipper than most poetry readings) and last night’s reading for the Face to Meet the Faces anthology celebration was just as fun. I got to see lots of my friends read – Peter Pereira, Martha Silano, editor Oliver de la Paz, among many other wonderful folks – and I got to meet co-editor Stacey Lynn Brown, which was fun! Another fun reader was Tiffany Midge, who did a wonderful job with the Hulk poem from the anthology as well as her own. I got to read Charles Jensen’s “After Oz” – which reminds me how much I like Charles’ poetry – as well as my own “When Red Becomes the Wolf.” It felt like a really fun time and I really loved the celebration of persona poetry! Yay, persona poetry!
I’ve got a class at National’s MFA program starting up in a few days, so I’m gearing up for teaching that again, as well as prepping for a presentation related to the mystery job possibility, trying to get things squared away with the new townhouse before our close, and, oh, yes, I’m moving in a month so I’m packing things up and getting rid of bags of old clothes and broken things.
So it’s National Poetry Month but my brain is full of many things to keep up in the air and moving forward…surprisingly, I’ve already written a couple of poems this month and I’ve been reading a really fun real-life tale of running an independent bookstore in Utah called “The King’s English.” Since I sometimes daydream about running my own bookstore, it’s a perfect escape book at the end of a long day. I recommend it!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
