April 1 Reading and Reception with Carolyne Wright to Kickoff Poetry Month

Mark your calendars for a special Poetry Month kickoff event with Carolyne Wright and the premiere reading of the anthology Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse Press, 2015), edited by Wright along with fellow poets Eugenia Toledo, and M. L. Lyons. The anthology is in response to the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and brings together voices of women poets in the workspaces they occupy: from cotton rows to corner suites, trawlers to typing pools, nursing stations to space stations, factory floors to faculty offices. These voices bear witness to women’s workplace lives, and act to re-envision and refigure the world of work for women.


Poet Carolyn Forché dsecribes the book as a compilation of “the heavy-lifters, night-shifters, line and piece workers, writing with grace and often with humor: poets who punch clocks, woman the phones and decks, weave, weld and can, cotton-pick and cold call, thread-spin, typeset and teach. They sex-work, they ship-build, plaster and preach, butcher and drive the bus. This is anthology as page-turner, as fist in the air, as do-it-yourself manual against despair.”

The reading, part of the 2014-2015 Artsmith Salon Series, takes place at Darvill's Bookstore at 1 Main Street in Eastsound, Washington on Wednesday, April 1, 6:00 pm. The reading will be followed by a Q and A with the author, reception with hors d'oeuvres, and book-signing.