Event Info
Planet Earth Poetry: Laura Ritland, Jennifer Zilm
Laura Ritland is a poet, teacher, critic, and scholar living in Berkeley, Califo...
7:15pm - 9:00pm Doors at: 6:45pm
By Donation
Event Description
Laura Ritland is a poet, teacher, critic, and scholar living in Berkeley, California. Her debut collection, East and West, was published with Véhicule Press in 2018—and both nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. East and West, Laura Ritland’s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view. Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegiac without being maudlin, East and West explores what Ritland calls the “middle ground” of childhood, family, diaspora, and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives.
Jennifer Zilm is the author of The Missing Field (Guernica 2018) and Waiting Room (Book*hug 2013). She is a failed biblical scholar, an archivist and public librarian. She is a Surrey girl in exile in East Vancouver. Her second poetry collection, The Missing Field, concerns themes of translation, preservation and the engagement with the transitory documents of everyday life—whether a snapshot of a Vancouver bus, postcards from the Middle East, lecture notes on Euripides, a van Gogh museum catalogue or marginalia in a water-damaged collection of Rilke poems. It was shortlisted for the 2019 Pat Lowther Memorial Award.
The Planet Earth Poetry reading series is a launching pad for the energies of writers and poets established and not. Between 6:45 and 7:00, put your name in the hat to read at open mic. Planet Earth Poetry acknowledges with respect that we read and write on the traditional territories of the WSÁNEĆ (Saanich), Lkwungen (Songhees), Wyomilth (Esquimalt) peoples of the Coast Salish Nation.
In-Person Event
Fri. August 16th 2019 + Add to Calendar
Hillside Coffee and Tea
