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Written by Alex Dew and Ian Lovering
We are so excited to announce that Get Lit! Programs and Spark Central will be hosting a free reading on March 22nd with poets Erika Meitner, Geffrey Davis, and Keetje Kuipers. The following morning, all three poets will lead a two-hour ticketed craft class. Proceeds will be split between Get Lit! and Spark Central, enabling them to put on the week-long Get Lit! Festival in April and continue providing support to those interested in the arts and education.
Both Get Lit! and Spark Central are non-profits with low budgets that work tirelessly to encourage creativity and learning in the Spokane area by hosting readings, classes, and events where everyone is welcome.
All three poets have solidified themselves as talented truth-tellers and masters of the poetic form. Erika Meitner is the author of five collections of poetry and the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Fullbright Scholarship for Poetry, and her most recent collection Holy Moly Carry Me is a finalist for the National Book Critics Award and won the National Jewish Book Award. She is well-known for her autobiographical poetry that explores her experience as a first-generation American and the child of a refugee. Geffrey Davis won the James A. Laughlin Award for his forthcoming book of poetry, Night Angler, and his 2014 collection Revising the Storm received the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry along with many other honors—including a 2019 NEA Literature Fellowship. Keetje Kuipers, known for crafting lines that devastate with their angst and passion, is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and has received numerous awards for her collections including Beautiful in the Mouth in 2010, The Keys to the Jail in 2014, and her upcoming book All its Charms due out this April. We are so lucky to have these three writers participate in this event, and they are sure to make it one you won’t want to miss.
Join us for the free reading March 22nd at 7:30 pm at Spark Central, and the craft class on the 23rd at 10 am. Tickets for the craft class on the 23rd are $30 or $20 for students. See the craft class description below:
“Reinventing the Poem of the American Family.”
We all know that families can be messy. But while poets have long put words to the page in an attempt to explore those complications, we have sometimes been more reluctant to set fire to the traditional models of parental devotion or childhood trauma that writers often make use of when engaging with the topic. How do we breath new life into such old stories? Whether caring for elderly parents or raising adopted children, these narratives remain utterly familiar while their settings, voices, and structures have never been so varied or new. In this craft class, we’ll take dynamite to the traditional models of how we write about family, employing such techniques as irreverence and mysticism as we attempt to not only explore but also explode our notions of how to write a poem about family. You’ll walk away with several new drafts of poems, as well as exercises that can be used again and again in order to re-engage your own writing about family.
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