'Salon' celebrates writers
Lost Horse Press with Sandpoint Parks & Rec proudly present “The Winter Salon: Lectures, Readings & Book Signings” featuring David Axelrod, Melissa Kwasny, and Christopher Howell at the Sandpoint Community Hall on Saturday, Dec. 9. Admission is free, and all are welcome.
The event will begin at 10 a.m., and will include lectures by the three featured writers, with discussions to follow each topic. David Axelrod presents “A Lyric Ecology for the End of the World (and After),” while Melissa Kwasny discusses “The Power of the Image” a theme from her recent book of essays entitled, Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision; and Christopher Howell considers “Poetry and the Inner Life.”
After the talks, the group will break for lunch. Lost Horse Press and the writers will adjourn to Thai Nigiri: we invite any local writers who wish to join us for lunch, a lively discussion, and general mayhem to do so at 12 noon. After lunch, the event will return to Community Hall for a reading and book signing, which will commence at 2 p.m.
• David Axelrod has published eight collections of poems and a collection of non-fiction, “Troubled Intimacies”. He teaches at Eastern Oregon University, where he directs the Ars Poetica Lecture Series and edits — along with Jodi Varon — the award-winning basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts. In addition, he is the co-director of the EOU low residency MFA. He is currently at work on new collections of poems and essays, as well as editing a new edition of the poems of the late Walt Pavlich.
- Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including “Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today”, “Pictograph, Reading Novalis in Montana”, and “The Nine Senses”, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Cecil Hemly Award. Kwasny is also the author of “Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision”, and has edited multiple anthologies. Widely published in journals anthologies, her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral She lives outside of Jefferson City, Mont, in the Elkhorn Mountains, and teaches at Carroll College.
- Christopher Howell has published 10 collecitons of poems, most recently “Gaze” and “Love’s Last Number”. His poems, translations, and essays have been widely published in anthologies and journals. The recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, he has also received multiple fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Washington Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
A native of the Northwest, Howell was a military journalist during the Vietnam War and later received an MA from Portland State University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He now teaches at Eastern Washington University, where he is also director of Willow Springs Books, and director and principal editor for Lynx House Press.