Poetry Night via ZOOM! Join us at 8 PM on Thursday, February 18th, 2021.
Dear Friends of Poetry,
Poetry Night is upon us once again, with the creativity and verve of three poets bound to warm your heart on a chilly evening in February. On Thursday, February 18th, at 8 PM PST, friends, readers, and aesthetes will gather together for a poetry reading via ZOOM. To participate, visit https://ucdavisdss.zoom.us/my/andyojones at 8 PM, or a few minutes before if you wish to chat with the host and the other attendees.
This short (30-minute) reading will feature poetry by Patrick Grizzell, Traci Gourdine, and Jeanne Wagner. Please join us, and bring your willingness to embrace delight and indeterminacy, for, as Eli Khamarov says, “Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition.”
Patrick Grizzell is a poet, songwriter and visual artist. His books include Dark Music, Chicken Months (about which Robert Bly wrote, “… the poems have a sweet spontaneity and tenderness.”), Minotaur Into Night (with sumi paintings by Jimi Suzuki), 13 Poems, It’s Like That, and the relatively forthcoming The Vignettes.
Grizzell was a founding member and previous director of, as well as an editor for, the Sacramento Poetry Center. He has published many interviews with noted writers and artists, and writes reviews and essays about literature and art. He was editor-in-chief of On The Wing, an arts magazine, and has written for many other publications. He has performed poetry and music with, among others, Allen Ginsberg, Leon Redbone, Ed Sanders, Shizumi Shigeto Manale, and Anne Waldman. His band, Proxy Moon, released its premiere CD in 2016.
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 was chair of the Creative Writing department for the California State Summer School for the Arts from 1988 – 2013. She was Chair of the Sacramento Poet Laureate Committee for three laureate terms. For ten years, she facilitated writing workshops within several California state prisons in the Arts in Corrections program for the William James Association. Her recent collection is Ringing in the Wild, from Ad Lumen Press.
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and two full-length collections: The Zen Piano-Mover from NFSPS Press, 2004 winner of the Stevens Manuscript Award, and In the Body of Our Lives, Sixteen Rivers Press 2010. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Inkwell Magazine Award, the Saranac Review Prize, The Thomas Merton Poetry of the Spiritual Award, The Arts & Letters Prize, and Sow’s Ear Awards for both an individual poem and a chapbook. Her most recent book, Everything Turns Into Something Else (2020), was named runner-up for the 2019 Grayson Books Poetry Prize. Regarding this most recent book, Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn has said, “Jeanne Wagner brings an originality to whatever she chooses to take on. I love, in particular, how she thinks her way down a page, every line seemingly discovered by the line that preceded it. A wonderful achievement.”
The Poetry Night Reading Series, taking place on the first and third Thursdays of the month, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley. Your host is Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis.
Please join us on Thursday, February 18th, at 8 PM via ZOOM!
Dr. Andy
Find the Facebook Event Page for this Reading Here: https://www.facebook.com/events/125023322854024
March and April featured poets will include Indigo Moor, Andrea Ross, and Julia Levine, all of whom will be reading from new books.
