An Evening of Poetry with Kathleen Flenniken, Elizabeth Austen and Dorothy Trogdon, May 30

Wednesday, May 30, University Book Store, at 7pm

Kathleen Flenniken’s first book, Famous (University of Nebraska, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, American Life in Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. Her second collection, Plume, has been selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and will be published in Spring 2012 by University of Washington Press.

Flenniken’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from Artist Trust and the Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop and was awarded an Emerging Writer’s Fellowship by The Writer’s Center in Bethesda in 2010. She teaches poetry through Seattle’s Writers in the Schools program, Jack Straw, and other arts agencies. Flenniken is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, a non-profit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets, and president of the board at Jack Straw.

Elizabeth Austen is a Seattle-based poet, performer, and teacher. She spent her teens and twenties working in the theatre and writing poems. A six-month solo walkabout in the Andes region of South America led her to focus exclusively on poetry. She is the author of Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011) and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet, part of the 2010 Toadlily Press quartet, Sightline. Her poems have appeared online ( The Writer’s Almanac,  Verse Daily), and in journals including Willow Springs, Bellingham Review, the Los Angeles Review, the Seattle Review, DMQ Review, and anthologies including Poets Against the War, Weathered Pages and In the Telling.

For more than 10 years, Elizabeth has produced literary programming for KUOW, 94.9, one of Seattle’s NPR affiliates, introducing recordings of Pacific Northwest literary events and interviewing local and national poets.  Search for “Elizabeth Austen” or “poetry” at http://www.kuow.org/ for audio links.
She served as the Washington “roadshow” poet for 2007, giving readings and workshops in rural areas around the state. She is the recipient of grants from Artists Trust, 4Culture and the City of Seattle, and is an alumna of Hedgebrook, Artsmith, the Whiteley Center, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and Antioch University-Los Angeles (MFA in poetry, 2001).

Dorothy Trogdon has been writing for most of her 85 years, but rarely shown her work to anyone except her closest friends. For the most part she kept them, as she says, "hidden away in a locked drawer." Several years ago, this began to change. Deciding it was time, she sent several poems to Floating Bridge Review where her work caught the eye of the editor and new state poet laureate, Kathleen Flenniken.

Trogdon's poetry is visionary and visual. She has distilled her decades of looking--at art, at the sea, at her gender, and at herself-- into a kind of light that can only be described as painterly. The poems are in turns lush and minimalist. They practice for the next world, rehearsing the leaving that visits us all, yet they cling to the childhood in Maine, to the waves of her youth and to the flora of the island she now calls home.


From the University Book Store events calendar:

Sure, National Poetry month is in April, but the fun doesn't have to stop once that month has left us. In May, we welcome three fine local poets–including the wonderful Kathleen Flenniken, the Washington State Poet Laureate 2012 – 2014–to our store to favor us with a night of verse. A who doesn't love an evening filled with meter and metaphor?