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DTSTART;TZID=America/Mexico_City:20250319T183000
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SUMMARY:Veterans Writing Collective with Sarah Colby
DESCRIPTION:The Veteran’s Writing Collective (VWC) encourages the art of writing in a workshop environment where participants are offered honest\, positive\, and constructive peer-to-peer and mentor feedback. The workshop is open to all active-duty military\, veterans\, retirees\, and their immediate family members. Writers of all levels working in all genres are welcome. \nThe VWC meets monthly online via Zoom.\nIf you would like an invitation to this class\, send an email to veteranscollective@geminiink.org\n\nSarah Colby was born in northern New Mexico and raised in the Rocky Mountains. She is married to a retired Army Chaplain and is mother to a son in the Navy. Sarah has an MFA in Creative Writing from Sierra Nevada College and an exuberant interest in making the ordinary luminous. Her war-time experiences have motivated her to be a voice for the mostly untold stories of families and loved ones during these years of protracted conflict. She is currently working on a manuscript of poems about her experiences as a military family member.\n \n 
URL:https://geminiink.org/events/veterans-writing-collective-2020-07-15-2021-11-17-2023-08-16-2023-12-20/2025-03-19/
LOCATION:Online via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Event,Online Workshop,Workshop
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ORGANIZER;CN="Sarah Colby":MAILTO:veteranscollective@geminiink.org
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Mexico_City:20250319T190000
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SUMMARY:The Big Texas Author Talk featuring Melissa Studdard
DESCRIPTION:Join us on Wednesday\, March 19th\, 2025 via Zoom for a conversation with Melissa Studdard\, to discuss her new book\, Dear Selection Committee (Jackleg Press). Moderated by Elena Karina Byrne.\n\n\n\n\n(Virtual Readings Monthly @ 7pm CST) \n\n\nRSVP\nSign up for Melissa Studdard’s class\, The Poetics of You: An Intro to Poetry Workshop on Monday\, April 7th! \n“I buried // everything they told me to bury. Then\, I dug it up again\,” Melissa Studdard writes in Dear Selection Committee\, an apt description of the work these poems do to unearth the incorrigible self and bury conventionality and its offspring\, shame. The speaker revels in her largesse\, claiming\, in one poem’s title\, she’s “Huge Like King Kong\, Like Godzilla\, Like Gulliver\,” and that the “world is my diorama of a world\,” and in another\, that her honeymoon pictures are “the cover / of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.” All of this immensity\, this grand unburying\, is squeezed into the prosaic corseting structure of a job application\, intensifying the split between tame and wild. Even her own birth is enacted with kinetic magnificence: “I broke the kingdom inside her\, broke the gala / of horses straining to get out. I broke the dancehall // mirrors and even the gilded faucet handles. / I was a river that strong. Made for flooding.” Indeed\, these poems are so desirous and animated that they spilled over the edges of the page and into my thirsty soul. “-Diane Seuss \n“The poems in Dear Selection Committee say what I’ve always wanted to say in a job application (and what I’m thinking as I perform the role of Normal Job Person) but never had the guts. Melissa Studdard’s burn-it-down-radical honesty is elating af—exactly what I needed to read—but the poetic attentiveness\, from the first page to the last\, was the real thrill. At the heart of the cyclone\, a dependable\, deepening pulse of self preservation.” -Jennifer L. Knox \n“In the universe of Melissa Studdard’s poems\, both the speaker and the audience will always have their cake and eat it too. After all\, “Life’s never dull when your name’s Melissa\,” and oh my goddess\, does Dear Selection Committee serve hard as a brilliant 21st-century take and critique of the epistolary\, filled with infinite heart and infinite humor and infinite neon signs that point towards the larger-than-life nature of poetry. This is excess. This is extravagance. This is the definition of sensuality. Studdard has the tremendous gift of finding the center of every poem\, giving us the whole damn thing.” -Dorothy Chan \nFramed as a job application and bounding with associative leaps and surrealist underpinnings\, Dear Selection Committee is a subversive\, sexy love song to an endlessly messy self and the burning world it inhabits. Full of apostrophic power\, these poems shift among registers of loss\, desire\, and joy as they wrestle with issues such as climate change\, addiction\, modern distractions\, gender presentation\, religious questioning\, and the nature of pain. Dear Selection Committee attests that although life can feel like a bumpy cab ride to an interview for a job you feel uniquely unqualified for\, if you lay aside the anxieties of self just long enough to peer out the window\, you’ll see great beauty amidst the chaos. \n\nMelissa Studdard is the author of five books\, including the poetry collection I ATE THE COSMOS FOR BREAKFAST. Her work has been published or featured by places such as NPR\, PBS\, The New York Times\, The Guardian\, POETRY\, Kenyon Review\, Psychology Today\, and New England Review. Her awards include The Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Memorial Award\, The Penn Review Poetry Prize\, the REEL Poetry Festival Audience Choice Award\, the Tom Howard Prize\, and more. \n\nModerator\nA Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry recipient\, Elena Karina Byrne served as a final judge for PEN’s “Best of the West” award\, for the 2016-2018 Kate and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards\, and for the international Laurel Prize in environmental poetry. Her five poetry collections include If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn\, 2021). Poems\, reviews\, essays\, and interviews can be found in POETRY\, The Kenyon Review\, The Paris Review\, APR\, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day\, Poetry Daily\, Verse Daily\, LA Review of Books\, Plume anthologies\, Reel Verse: Poems About the Movies\, BOMB\, and elsewhere. Former 12-year Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America\, Elena now works as a freelance editor\, lecturer\, reviewer\, and Programming Consultant & Poetry Stage Manager for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.
URL:https://geminiink.org/events/the-big-texas-author-talk-featuring-melissa-studdard/
LOCATION:Online via Zoom
CATEGORIES:Event
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ORGANIZER;CN="Mandy Lynn Lara":MAILTO:mllara@geminiink.org
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