editorial@newsandsentinel.com
NELSONVILLE The February session of the Spoken & Heard series hosted by Kari Gunter-Seymour, Poet Laureate of Ohio, will be held 7 p.m. Thursday at Stuart’s Opera House in Nelsonville.
Spoken & Heard is a seasonal series of literary events featuring award-winning authors, poets and singer/songwriters from across the country.
February’s event will feature poet Allison Joseph and author Wesley Browne. To register go to stuartsoperahouse.org.
Joseph lives, writes and teaches in Carbondale, Ill., where she is on the faculty at Southern Illinois University.
Her poetry collection, “Confessions of a Barefaced Woman” (Red Hen Press) was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry and won the Feathered Quill Book Award.
Chelsea Dingman’s first book,
Thaw, was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her second poetry collection,
Through a Small Ghost, won The Georgia Poetry Prize (University of Georgia Press, 2020). She is also the author of the chapbook,
What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018)
. Visit her website www.chelseadingman.com.
INTRODUCTION
If I could tell my younger self one thing about being a poet, it is simply that a writer is someone who writes. That the interaction with the page, that relationship that I’ve valued and trusted my whole life, is the most important relationship that I have, whether it is my work on the page, or the work of someone else. Sometimes, I only have scraps of time to engage in reading and writing. I am taking notes on my phone in traffic, or reading a collection of a few poems at a time in the early morning while my kids are still sleeping. But this engagement is life-sustaining.