Mary Mackey

Mary Mackey and Judy Grahn

27 SEPTEMBER 2026 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry book launch reading by Mary Mackey, The Goddess of Burning Hair, appearing with Judy Grahn, Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling: New & Selected Poems, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm (poetryflash.org).

The featured books will be available at the reading, and some are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Mary Mackey's brand-new collection, The Goddess of Burning Hair, is the first complete collection of Mackey's goddess poems, published by Women's Spirituality Studies Press. Spanning more than fifty years, the poems are lyrical, tender, fierce, brilliantly written, sometimes prophetic, and informed by both lived knowledge and scholarship. Jane Hirshfield says, "The poems in this book emerge from Mary Mackey's lifetime of learning from, studying, listening to, respecting, and giving voice to the spirit of Gaia, the Great Mother, Iemanjá, Aphrodite, and their human attendants, acolytes, devotees. These poems carry eros and ferocity, strength and tenderness, intimacy and largeness…." Mary Mackey became a writer by running high fevers; visiting the ruins of the neolithic, goddess-worshiping cultures of Old Europe; tramping through tropical jungles; being swarmed by army ants, and reading. Her novels and poems have been praised widely for their beauty, precision, gripping plots, originality, and extraordinary range. Mackey is the author of ten collections of poetry, most recently In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse, and including Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Award; and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press; as well as fourteen novels, including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion and the Earthsong Series, four novels about the Goddess-worshiping people of Old Europe, soon to be reissued by Open Road Media.

Judy Grahn, renowned poet, activist, scholar, is the author of works that fueled both the Feminist and Lesbian-Feminist movements, in the U.S. and internationally. Her poetry collections include Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling: New & Selected Poems. She has published numerous books, among them The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Eruptions of Inanna: Justice, Gender, and Erotic Power, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds; Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World; and her memoir, A Simple Revolution: The Making of an Activist Poet. She is currently working on The Queen of Cups, her third book-length epic poem. (Her previous two book-length poems explore the myth of Helen of Troy, and conflating her with the ancient Sumerian goddess Inanna). In a 2009 essay for the Boston Review on the poetry of the women's movement, Honor Moore spoke of hearing Grahn read her epic poem "A Woman Is Talking to Death" in the early 1970s: "With this poem the whole political enterprise of feminism was subsumed by poetic means into an understanding of the complexity of the stark power relations that involve gender, race, and sexuality." Judy Grahn's honors include two Lambda Literary Awards, two American Book Awards, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, American Library Award, and a Founding Foremothers of Women's Spirituality Award. Since 1997, Triangle Publishers, after awarding Grahn a Lifetime Achievement Award in Lesbian Letters, have issued an annual Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award.