Rebecca Foust
Photo: William Harvey

Rebecca Foust and Janée J. Baugher

7 APRIL 2024 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Janée J. Baugher, Seattle poet and author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, and Rebecca Foust, Only, Marin County Poet Laureate emerita, 2727 California Street, Berkeley, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Poet Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction. WomensVoicesforChange.org calls it, "a guidebook that comprehensively treats the subject of ekphrasis at the same time it provides an inspiriting and practical guide to those who aspire to practice it." She's published two books of poetry, The Coordinates of Yes and The Body's Physics, which David Roderick says "demonstrates extraordinary poetic vision, and her lyric style is both tender and resolutely connected to the body." A featured poet both at the Library of Congress and on Seattle TV, Janée Baugher was a judge for the 2023 "Frame to Frames" ekphrastic film prize (Fotogenia Festival in Mexico City). As a collaborator she's had poems adapted for the stage and set to music at Interlochen Center for the Arts (Michigan), University of Cincinnati, Contemporary Dance Theatre (Ohio), Dance Now! Ensemble (Florida), Otterbein University, and University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Baugher is an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and recipient of a 2024 CityArtist grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Rebecca Foust's seventh poetry collection is Only. Ellen Bass says, "In Only, her luminous new collection of poems, Rebecca Foust's gifts are in full flower. Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical, these poems wrestle with the big questions—religion, immigration, climate change, politics, parenting, autism, and death—all on a deeply intimate level. Like an impressionist painter, she uses light to capture the immediacy of the present, the passage of time." Her previous collections include Paradise Drive; All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song; in collaboration with Lorna Stevens, God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World; and three chapbooks, including The Unexpected Ordnance Bin. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2023 New Ohio Review prize, 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. As Marin County Poet Laureate 2017-2019, her program, "Poetry as Sanctuary," featured readings by local immigrant poets.