The Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Arts Council’s Fourth Annual Poetry Month Celebration

The Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Arts Council is pleased to present its fourth annual Poetry Month Celebration on Wednesday, April 27 at 7:00 p.m. at Third Place Commons in Lake Forest Park Towne Centre.  Winners of the annual poetry contest in student and adult categories, juried by poets Jeannine Hall Gailey and Martha Silano, will read their poems. Published poets Belle Randall and Janee J. Baugher will then read and discuss their work. The M.C. is King County Library System librarian Aerene Storms. Sponsored in part by Friends of Third Place Commons and Humanities Washington.

More on the featured poets:

JANEE J. BAUGHER is the author of "Coordinates of Yes." Most recently she was  invited to read her poetry at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC on March 15, 2011. Her work has appeared in Boulevard, Portland Review, Ekphrasis and Verse Daily, and has been adapted for dance and set to music at several venues. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Bread Loaf Conference participant. Baugher is an editor and teacher and lives in Seattle. She has an MFA from Eastern Washington University, and has taught at Highline Community College, UW-Experimental College, and Richard Hugo House. She has performed at Bumbershoot, Get Lit!, Arts Edge Arts Festival, and was a Jack Straw Writer. Baugher just completed a second term as a Humanities Washington Inquiring Minds Speaker. A former poetry editor of Willow Springs and Switched-on Gutenberg, she collaborates with visual artists, composers, and choreographers, most recently at University of Cincinnati, Interlochen Center for the Arts, and Dance Now! Ensemble. Her début collection of poems is Coördinates of Yes (Ahadada Books, 2010.)

BELLE RANDALL is the former recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (2005-7). She has been a panelist for the NEA. Her most recent book is The Coast Starlight, forthcoming from David Robert Books later this year (2010). Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals including The Threepenny Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and PN Review (England), as well as such anthologies as Contemporary Religious Poetry and  A Gift of Tongues. A former Wallace Stegner Fellowship winner and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, she taught for twenty years in the University of Washington Writer's Certificate Program and at Cornish College of the Arts.

More on the Jurors:

Student category juror Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books, 2006) and She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books, 2011.) Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in journals like The Iowa Review, The Seattle Review, and Rattle. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review and currently teaches at the MFA program at National University. Her web site iswww.webbish6.com.

Adult category juror Martha Silano is the author of Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books 2006) and What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press 1999). Her poems are forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, 32poems, and 13th Moon, and have been anthologized in Not for Mother's Only: On Child-Rearing and Child-Getting (Fence Books 2007) and Letters to the World: Poems from the WOMPO Listserv (Red Hen Press 2008). Martha is a 2007 Artist Trust GAP grant recipient and a 2008 Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center visiting scholar. Martha teaches at Edmonds and Bellevue Community Colleges.

M.C.:

AERENE STORMS is a librarian, a storyteller, and a huge fan of poetry.She serves as a judge for the King County Library System Teen Poetry Contest, and originated and maintains the annual "Serendipity Poetry Project", which places printed poetry in unexpected locations inside local public libraries, including the libraries in Lake Forest Park and Richmond Beach.She also shares stories, music and poetry as a storytelling-host of KSER Radio's Sunday morning program Global Griot.