Maw Shein Win

Kathleen McClung, Kim Shuck, Maw Shein Win

8 DECEMBER 2024 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading featuring Kathleen McClung, Questions of Buoyancy, Kim Shuck, Pick a Garnet to Sleep in, and Maw Shein Win, Percussing the Thinking Jar, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).


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Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Kim Shuck's new book of poems is Pick a Garnet to Sleep in. Stephen Meadows says, "The poems of Kim Shuck are vital. They are tenacious, exquisite, concise, unbounded truthful, and bold as the last drops of ale, as our inevitable reckoning with death." The seventh laureate emerita of San Francisco 2017-2021, she is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose. Her previous collections include Deer Trails: San Francisco Poet Laureate Series, Exile Heart, Rabbit Stories, and more. She is also editor, co-editor, or edit-curious for several anthologies, including This Wandering State: Poems from Alta [California]. Among her honors are an Inaugural National Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets and a Censorship Award from PEN Oakland.

Maw Shein Win's new book of poems is Percussing the Thinking Jar. Lee Herrick says, "Percussing the Thinking Jar is a marvel of lyric invention. The 'thought logs' make stream of consciousness feel new. Stroke log, vertigo log, anxiety meditations, wild ideas: no idea or language is out of Win's reach." Her previous collections include Storage Unit for the Spirit House, nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for CALIBA's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry; Invisible Gifts: New and Selected Poems; and two chapbooks, Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. A Burmese-American poet who teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco, she served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California 2016-2018.

Kathleen McClung's new book of poems is Questions of Buoyancy. Jim Daniels says, "Kathleen McClung may be the finest poet writing in form today." Her previous collections include A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, Temporary Kin, The Typists Play Monopoly, and Almost the Rowboat. Writer-in-Residence at Friends of the San Francisco Library 2018-2019, she received the Rita Dove Award from the Salem College 2012 International Literary Awards, and was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as winner of the 2012 National Poetry Competition sponsored by the Cultural Center for Cape Cod. She won the Morton Marr prize in 2017. A teacher of writing and literature for over twenty years, she has led writing workshops in San Francisco and Berkeley.