On Friday, April 15th, the poetry reading series The Other Voice presents Briony Gylgayton and Traci Gourdine as the featured poets. The series is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Davis, located at 27074 Patwin Road. We meet at 7:30 in the library of the church. Refreshments and open mic follow the reading.
Traci Gourdine and Briony Gylgayton
Briony Gylgayton has won multiple awards for her writing, including placing second for the University of California system-wide 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize, and placing for both creative writing categories in the 2010 Pamela Maus Contest for Creative Writing, winning first in fiction and second in poetry. Her Creative Writing Honors Thesis, a manuscript of poetry about psychological disorders, was awarded the 2010 Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Work. Her work has been published extensively in local journals, including The Tule Review, The Yolo Crow, the Blue Moon Literary and Art Review, the Suisun Valley Review, and Nameless Magazine. Briony currently works as the head of public relations for the Poetry Night Reading Series, and as a web designer for Eager Mondays, where she specializes in creating websites for poets and writers. She will begin her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop this August.
Traci Gourdine’s poetry and stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has been anthologized within Shepard and Thomas’ Sudden Fiction Continued (Norton Publishing). Traci and Quincy Troupe were paired in a year long exchange of letters for the anthology Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books). She is co-editor of Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming (Candlewick Press), an anthology of writing by young Native writers, as well as We Beg to Differ, poems by Sacramento poets against the war. She has also co-edited the Tule Review with Luke Breit for the Sacramento Poetry Center. Traci Gourdine is a professor of English at American River College and chairs the Creative Writing department for the California State Summer School for the Arts. She was Chair of the Sacramento Poet Laureate Committee for four laureate terms. For ten years she facilitated writing workshops within several California state prisons.
Below is a poem by Traci Gourdine followed by one by Briony Gylgayton:
Garden Song
by Traci Gourdine
birth coming
a readiness stills time
tides of new waters
break
crimson yet clear
a seizure of oozing
life
loud cries in harmony
urgent whispers straddle the room
walls bump
floors grind and sweat
from start to finish shadows
drop in reverence
so dear
lay low hard winds
stay sweet old grass
a quaking has come
spinning colors in this arrangement
life
here returns the new
ancestor
In The Park, The Very Old
by Briony Gylgayton
Man, stiff round globe head
hairspill down from Arctic circle
that spins in wind, fears combs
Woman made of bear leather
fingers are guitar wires
snapping ferociously
until young Gabe maybe
little glasses and pinchy
face turned slantways
approached. What are you playing? Gabe asked
What song is that you’re playing?
those two upthrusts of basalt from old time
peered at fluffed up hoot owl Gabe maybe Gabe
maybe the earthquake that made them
