Poetry Under the Cone, April 15 at Museum of Glass

Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken

April is National Poetry Month and local creatives have a stellar line-up of events planned for Tacoma. Here’s one hot event you don’t want to miss – Tacoma Poet Laureate, Josie Emmons Turner; Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken; and poets Rick Barot and Michael Schmeltzer will come together for a reading at the Museum of Glass (1801 Dock St.). It happens on Sunday, April 15, at 3 pm and admission to the reading is free. The event is sponsored in partnership with the Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Arts Commission.

Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012-2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Her new collection Plume (University of Washington Press) is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site.  Her first book Famous (University of Nebraska Press) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken’s awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust.

Tacoma Poet Laureate Josie Emmons Turner

Josie Emmons Turner is the 2011 – 2013 Tacoma Poet Laureate. She earned her Masters in Fine Arts from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and has been published in California Quarterly, Backstreet Review, the Floating Bridge Review, and the anthology In Tahoma’s Shadow. Her broadside Pagoda was recently published by Springtide Press. She has been an artist in resident at Centrum and teaches writing and literature at Clover Park High School.

poet Rick Barot

Rick Barot has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002) and Want (2008) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and his poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and Ploughshares. Barot is an associate professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University and is also on the poetry faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

poet Michael Schmeltzer

Michael Schmeltzer’s poems have earned many honors including four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water-Stone Review, the New York Quarterly and many others.

This is an event for people who love language and the art of crafting it!