[cid:image002.jpg@01CD13FE.D9FEAE60] News Release >From the City of Tacoma, Washington www.cityoftacoma.org<http://www.cityoftacoma.org> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 6, 2012 MEDIA CONTACTS Josie Emmons Turner, Tacoma Poet Laureate, josie.turner.poet@gmail.com<mailto:josie.turner.poet@gmail.com>, (253) 678-6117 Naomi Strom-Avila, Community and Economic Development, nstrom-avila@cityoftacoma.org<mailto:nstrom-avila@cityoftacoma.org>, (253) 591-5191 Karrie Spitzer, Community Relations, karrie.spitzer@cityoftacoma.org<mailto:karrie.spitzer@cityoftacoma.org>, (253) 591-5790 Celebrate National Poetry Month with free poetry event In celebration of National Poetry Month, the public is invited to join Tacoma Poet Laureate, Josie Emmons Turner; Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken; and poets Rick Barot and Michael Schmeltzer for a reading on April 15, at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Glass, 1801 Dock St. Admission to the reading is free and is sponsored in partnership with the Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Arts Commission. Flenniken is the 2012-2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Her new collection Plume (University of Washington Press) is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site. Her first book Famous (University of Nebraska Press) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken's awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust. Turner is the 2011 - 2013 Tacoma Poet Laureate. She earned her Masters in Fine Arts from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and has been published in California Quarterly, Backstreet Review, the Floating Bridge Review, and the anthology In Tahoma's Shadow. Her broadside Pagoda was recently published by Springtide Press. She has been an artist in resident at Centrum and teaches writing and literature at Clover Park High School. Barot has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002) and Want (2008) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and his poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and Ploughshares. Barot is an associate professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University and is also on the poetry faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Schmeltzer's poems have earned many honors including four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review's Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water-Stone Review, the New York Quarterly and many others. Information about the Tacoma Poet Laureate program is available at http://www.tacomaculture.org/arts/PoetLaureate.asp. ###