(Heather H. Thomas Photo Credit: Alexandra Whitney)
Join Berks County Poet Laureates Heather H. Thomas, Sandra Fees, & Jayne Relaford Brown on Zoom!
When: Thursday, November 5th, 2020 at 6 pm
Where: TinyURL.com/VirtualBard to reach us on Zoom
If required, please enter the Meeting ID 759 062 6042
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This reading is to bring attention to the 9th Berks Poet Laureate Competition, hosted by Reading Area Community College.
Heather H. Thomas and Sandra Fees are past poet laureates, while Jayne Relaford Brown is the current Berks County Poet Laureate.
Submissions for the current competition are due in December 2020.
See https://racc.edu/poetry for all guidelines.
Below are sample poems and biographies for our featured poets:
Atonement
By Heather H. Thomas
Which one travels
toward the stranger?
Who in nightspeed slits
of borders, time zones
word-maps crossing
multilingual
what’s on the tongue
risking trust
without translation
atonement in a zip of light
drawn across the sky’s
at(one)ment
as the light shifts
but does not separate
one with other, one.
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Heather H. Thomas is the award-winning author of Vortex Street (FutureCycle Press, 2018), Blue Ruby, Resurrection Papers, Practicing Amnesia, and a bilingual selected poems, Reconocimento/Recognition. Berks County Poet Laureate 2008-2010, Heather’s honors include a Rita Dove Poetry Prize, a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry, and a fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems are translated and published in Albanian, Arabic, Italian, Lithuanian, Spanish, and Swedish. She has poems forthcoming in Planet In Crisis, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and The Shining Rock Poetry Anthology.
Threshold
By Sandra Fees
Stumbling upon the smile
of fox eyes at the jagged
edges of dark
the agile limbs poised
at the threshold of seasons
breath held
our bodies mutually reticent
our muzzles full of light and dark
mouthing life and death.
The winter fur is rust
red as my sister’s wavy hair
and I think of her winding
her way in the wild habitat
of each small injury:
loss of sight, loss of love—
each illuminating a mystery
curious as my hand
reaching across the clearing
as if to stroke
the lengthening silk of her.
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Sandra Fees (she/her) is the author of The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Moving, Being Moved (Five Oaks Press, 2017). She served a term as Berks County Poet Laureate (2016-2018), and her work has appeared in The Blue Nib, Kissing Dynamite, and Sky Island Journal.
EVENING READING AT THE SILENT WRITING WORKSHOP
By Jayne Relaford Brown
First mouthful after sunset,
Slow-savored, tongued,
Palpable, luscious as
Melon, pleasure, nectar.
Melanin, puncture, neck brace—
every word as joyously received,
sounded silently in listeners’ mouths
round enough to hold whole eggs.
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Jayne Relaford Brown is the 2019-2021 Poet Laureate for Berks County, Pennsylvania. She is the author of My First Real Tree, a book of poems from FootHills Publications. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Blueline, Cider Press Review, Alligator Juniper, All We Know of Pleasure, and as the title poem in I Am Becoming the Woman I’ve Wanted. Brown was a finalist in this year’s Steve Kowit poetry competition. She received an MFA from San Diego State, and taught college writing in San Diego and Pennsylvania until retiring in 2018.
