Events

Click HERE to join our Fundraiser, Sept 29th.

Sunday, September 29, 4-6pm, in the Buchan Room at First Unitarian Church (enter at The Elliot Center, 1126 SW Salmon St, Portland 97205). $25/person.

Click HERE to buy tickets online, or email your RSVP to: Paul.ClayStreet@gmail.com.

Sponsored by First Unitarian Church’s Committee on Hunger and Homelessness

Come for an entertaining reading of poems (even for those who don’t think they like poetry) and a forum in which the poets will speak about: what it means to be a poet; how they became poets; why they write poetry (and not novels, for example); what poetry means to them and what poetry can mean to others. They’ll also welcome the opportunity to answer questions.

Enjoy a glass of wine and some cheese, and possibly win a book or broadside donated by the poets as door prizes.

Brief Literary Biographies of our Poets

John Brehm is the author of Sea of Faith, Help Is on the Way, and No Day at the Beach (forthcoming in 2020), all from The University of Wisconsin Press. He is the editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy, and the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Ohio Review, The Sun, Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review, Plume, The Southern Review, Best American Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, and many other journals and anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches for Mountain Writers Series.

Andrea Hollander is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently, Blue Mistaken for Sky, finalist for the 2018 Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest. Her fourth collection was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Among her many other honors are two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction) and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. For twenty-two years Hollander served as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2011 she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she founded the Ambassador Writing Seminars.

Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, has seven full-length books of poetry, most recently One Small Sun, from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, Calyx, and the Internet’s Poetry Daily. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she received the 2006 Holbrook Award from Oregon Literary Arts. In 2013 she was Willamette Writers’ Distinguished Northwest Writer. The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds chose a poem from her book The Voluptuary as the lyric for choral composition that’s now part of the repertoire of the Choir at Trinity College Cambridge.