Mark Your Calendars

There are fantastic FREE readings coming up for those in the DC area:

Thursday, MAY 21 - 7 PM

Reading with Michael Sragow and Brenda Wineapple
at the Arts Club of Washington (2017 I St. NW, DC)

Michael Sragow and Brenda Wineapple, joint winners of the National Award for Arts Writing, will give a public reading on Thursday, May 21 at 7:00 p.m. at the Arts Club of Washington. Sragow has won for Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (Pantheon Books); Wineapple has won for White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Alfred A. Knopf).

The National Award for Arts Writing gives $15,000 to an outstanding nonfiction book about the arts. This year’s award was judged by critic David Kipen; Linda Pastan, former Poet Laureate of Maryland; and Reynolds Price, NBCC Award-winner and author of twenty-two novels. Kipen and Pastan will be on hand to introduce the winning authors. A reception and booksigning will follow.

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Monday, JUNE 1 - 7 PM

Cafe Muse Literary Series with Wayne Miller and Eric Pankey
at the Friendship Heights Village Center (4433 South Park Avenue, Chevy Chase, MD)

Wayne Miller is the author of two collections of poems, The Book of Props (Milkweed) and Only the Senses Sleep (New Issues), translator of Moikom Zeqo’s I Don't Believe in Ghosts and co-editor of New European Poets. He teaches as the University of Central Missouri, where he co-edits Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

Eric Pankey is the author of eight books of poetry, including For the New Year, winner of the Walt Whitman Award, Cenotaph, Oracle Figures, Reliquaries, and most recently, The Pear As One Example (Ausable Press). He is professor of English at George Mason University.

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And this last one, which I am hosting--and particularly excited about--

Wednesday, June 3 - 7 PM

"Flirting with the Masters": Poets on Emily Dickinson,
Featuring Jessica Garratt and Lisa Russ Spaar
at the Arts Club of Washington (2017 I St. NW, DC)

Jessica Garratt is the author of Fire Pond, which won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, selected by Medbh McGuckian (University of Utah Press). Garratt is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she holds a Creative Writing Fellowship.

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of Satin Cash: Poems (Persea Books), Blue Venus: Poems (Persea Books) and Glass Town: Poems (Red Hen Press), for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000. Spaar is the Director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2009.

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Spread the word! All of these programs deserve big crowds.