Join us for our monthly poetry event featuring three poets! In February, we welcome Artress Bethany White, Kathleen O’Toole, and Alice Friman. Poet and Poetrio Coordinator Mildred K Barya will host.
Click here to RSVP. The link required to attend will be emailed on the day of the event.
Like most of our events, this event is free. If you decide to attend and to purchase the authors’ books, we ask that you purchase from Malaprop’s. When you do this you make it possible for us to continue hosting author events and you keep more dollars in our community. If you would like to support us without purchasing a book, you may also make a donation or purchase a gift card below. Thank you!
Artress Bethany White is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. She is the recipient of the Trio Award for her poetry collection, My Afmerica (Trio House Press, 2019). Her debut essay collection, Survivor’s Guilt: Essays on Race and American Identity (New Rivers Press, 2020), is currently listed as a Community of Literary Magazines and Presses ( CLMP ) social justice read. Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, Solstice, Poet Lore, Ecotone, Birmingham Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and The Hopkins Review. New work is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review and Tahoma Review. White has received fellowships and residencies at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Writer’s Hotel, and the Tupelo Press/MASS MoCA studios. She is associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University and teaches poetry and nonfiction workshops for Rosemont College Summer Writer’s Retreat in Pennsylvania. She is current nonfiction editor at the Boston-based literary magazine Pangyrus. http://www.artressbethanywhite.com
In verse, both free and deftly formal, Artress Bethany White unflinchingly mines the notion of family: biological, blended, constructed and decidedly American. She takes no prisoners, or perhaps takes us all prisoners, kicking into the necessary and discomfiting discourse of who we truly are—and how we are tied together in awful, and also surprisingly beautiful, ways.
Kathleen O’Toole has braided an active professional life in community organizing with teaching and writing. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals including America, Atlanta Review, Christian Century, Cresset, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Presence and smartish Pace. Her latest collection This Far, was released by Paraclete Press in October 2019. Her other books include two chapbooks, Practice and Waking Hours, and a previous full-length collection, Meanwhile, as well as In the Margins, which she co-authored with three other women poets. Her poem “Sierra Lament” won the 2020 Connecticut River Review Poetry Prize. Kathleen is the current Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, MD. Find her work at https://kathleenotoolepoetry.com
This Far: Poems offers a rich harvest taken from one season in the poet’s creative life. Like movements in a musical composition, these poems share leitmotifs—grief and the desire to honor those “saints” who have passed on; the sacramental power of nature; and, how works of art illuminate and console. They point to the tension between the practice of monastic silence and the urge to bear witness, interrogating faith in the light of crises facing the earth and our human community. At the same time, the poet celebrates encounters that offer blessings of hope, inviting us to join her in a pilgrimage that leads us, with her, “this far,” and gestures to what lies beyond.
Alice Friman’s seventh collection of poetry, Blood Weather, is from LSU press. She is a recipient of many honors including two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in Best American Poetry. She’s been published in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Plume, The Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Cloudbank, and many others. She lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she was Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. Her website is alicefrimanpoet.com
Blood Weather reminds readers that times of reckoning are marked by blood: the knife, the sword, the cutting word. Blood runs through our history, stories, religion, and art, and we cannot help but play our part by adding to the storm of “fang and claw” and its inherent sorrow. Friman traces this unending path through biblical tales, the war of the sexes, the continuum of art, and her own family and personal life. Her poems reflect on figures ranging from Lady Macbeth—whom Friman sees in the blood-red tree outside her bedroom window—to Cain and Abel in the biblical account of the first murder, through Judge Judy’s frustrations when faced with the death of a marriage, to the poet herself as a child learning to read “the ancient writing of the butcher block / streaked with cuts and sacrifice” and the butcher’s hands, “blunt-fingered and stained.” By turns stark and resilient, the poems in Blood Weather draw on tragic themes and painful memories to evoke the
