Four poets — Jeanne-Marie Osterman, Janice N. Harrington, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, and Christopher X. Shade — read from their recent books to honor loss and grief, and at the same time celebrate hope and healing.
Join us on Sunday January 24, at 3p PST / 6p EST (see other timezones) for this virtual poetry reading co-hosted by CAGIBI, a journal of poetry and prose, and Paloma Press, a San Francisco Bay Area-based independent literary press publishing poetry, prose, and limited edition books.
Links to Join and Share
The link to register & join is: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/reaching-for-joy
If you’re on Facebook, an invite to share is: https://fb.me/e/8hk6Uv7nF
Program
Order of appearance. Readers may or may not read from the books presented.
Paloma Press publisher Aileen Cassinetto will introduce Jeanne-Marie Osterman and her forthcoming book of poems Shellback.
Jeanne-Marie Osterman is the author of the book of poems Shellback, forthcoming February 1 from Paloma Press, and There’s a Hum (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in Borderlands, Cathexis Northwest, 45th Parallel Magazine, The Madison Review, and elsewhere.
A finalist for the 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Award and 2017 Levis Prize in Poetry, she is poetry editor for CAGIBI.
Janice N. Harrington writes poetry and children’s books. She grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings, especially rural Alabama, figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her second book of poetry, The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home, came out in 2011, and her third book, Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin, appeared in 2016. She is also the winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers.
Harrington’s children’s books have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library.
Harrington’s poetry appears regularly in American literary magazines. She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019) and the current Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara.
She is also the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, and of Small Gods of Grief, which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. In 2007, Ausable Press published her third poetry collection A New Hunger which the American Library Association selected as Notable Book for 2008. She is also an anthologist, translator, editor and consultant.
Christopher X. Shade is author of the novel The Good Mother of Marseille (2019) and the book of poems Shield the Joyous (2020). He is co-founding editor of Cagibi. His stories and book reviews have appeared widely, and he has won story awards including the 2016 Writers at Work fellowship competition. He teaches fiction and poetry writing at The Writers Studio. Raised in the South, he now lives with his wife in New York City. His debut book of poems Shield the Joyous is about the loss of loved ones to the disease of addiction.
About Our Hosts
PALOMA PRESS
Established in 2016, Paloma Press is a San Francisco Bay Area-based independent literary press publishing poetry, prose, and limited edition books. Paloma Press believes in the power of the literary arts, how it can create empathy, bridge divides, change the world. We actively engage in “bayanihan”—a term which encompasses community strengthening and cooperation, and nourishing connections and shared identities. To this end, we have released fundraising chapbooks such as MARAWI, in support of relief efforts in the Southern Philippines; and AFTER IRMA AFTER HARVEY, in support of hurricane-displaced animals in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico. As part of the San Francisco Litquake Festival, we proudly curated the wildly successful literary reading, “THREE SHEETS TO THE WIND,” and raised money for the Napa Valley Community Disaster Relief Fund. In 2018, the fundraising anthology, HUMANITY, was released in support of UNICEF’s Emergency Relief campaigns on the borders of the United States and in Syria. Paloma Press continues to donate a portion of its proceeds to non-profits committed to working for racial justice, animal rights, marginalized communities, and climate change.
CAGIBI is invested in sharing the universal human experiences to be found in works of prose and poetry set within places unfamiliar to readers; thus, our expressed interest in international—or world—literature, and works in translation. CAGIBI is versatile in its purpose and mission to readers and writers. The journal concerns literature in which character conflict, ultimately story, is tied to place. The retreats provide unique and stimulating place experience. In one interpretation, le cagibi is the place at which a writer’s inspiration is rendered into story, or shaped into poem.
PALOMA PRESS 