'An Afternoon of Poetry' at Jones Library

“An Afternoon of Poetry,” featuring Lynne Thompson and Nikky Finney with Keli Stewart, Kim Rogers, Laurie Guerrero and Karen Johnston, will be presented Sunday, Feb. 3, at 4 p.m. in the Trustees Room of the Jones Library in Amherst.

Born to a civil rights attorney and a teacher in the small fishing and farming community of Conway, S.C., Finney has been writing her entire life. Her poems provide glimpses into the human adventures of birth, death, family, violence, sexuality and relationships. Her book of poetry, “Rice,” was awarded the PEN American Book Award. She is the 2007-08 Graze Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

This year’s Perugia Press Prize winner, Thompson is the author of “Beg No Pardon,” which also won the Great Lakes Colleges Association 2008 New Writers Award. She lives in Los Angeles.

Hailing from Chicago, Stewart’s poetry travels across regions in an exploration of the magical everyday. Beginning with Mississippi women, trees shaped like vaginas, the resistance in double-dutch and the blues, her current work explores race, class and gender in the Pioneer Valley. Stewart is the recipient of the Douglas Turner Ward/Alice Childress Scriptwriting Award given by the Gwendolyn Brooks Center and has one chapbook titled “Womanish.”

Rogers is a Northampton native and winner of the 2007 Ruth Olin Corbin Prize for Poetry. Rogers has been published in several local and national magazines, including American Writing, and she won Pulp City Magazine’s Short Story Prize in 2000. Rogers’ poems center on women’s issues, often exploring mother-daughter relationships, social issues, especially Native American issues, and recovering and retelling women-focused historical narratives.

Johnston is a social worker by vocation, a Unitarian-Universalist-with-Buddhist tendencies by faith, a lay preacher by gift, a mother by choice, a socialist by inclination, and a poet by avocation. She is a member of the Florence Poets Society, located in her current hometown. Her work has been published in Silkworm and Equinox and can be found in the forthcoming anthology, “Women. Period.” She has one chapbook, a collection of her sensual poems, titled “Struck Just So.”

Guerrero is a two-time winner of the Rosemary Thomas Poetry Prize, and her chapbook manuscript was recently selected by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Panhandler Publishing competition. It will be available in February. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Palo Alto Review, Literary Mama, the 2007 and 2008 Texas Poetry Calendars, Meridians, Feminist Studies and most recently in “The Weight of Addition: an Anthology of Texas Poets.” Born and raised in San Antonio, she is currently an Ada Comstock Scholar at Smith.

The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by Food for Thought Books, Perugia Press, the Jones Library and the Everywoman’s Center. Refreshments and a book-signing will follow the reading.

For more information, contact Food for Thought at 253-5432, Everywoman’s Center at 545-0883 or Perugia Press at 587-2646.

January 27, 2008.

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