PORT TOWNSEND — When it comes to inspiration, this poetry reading prefers “Home Cookin” — that is, poetry nourished and prepared in the Pacific Northwest.
Three poets from the Pacific Northwest will read their works at Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 2333 San Juan Ave., at 7 p.m. today in the sanctuary.
Free to attend
The public reading series is free to attend.
The poets include Tess Gallagher, considered by some the “empress of Pacific Northwest poetry”; Gary Copeland Lilley, a North Carolina native who has been called an “archetypal denizen of the modern South”; and Geoff Bowman, who considers himself either the oldest young Pacific Northwest poet or the youngest old PNW poet, according to a press release.
Novelist, playwright
Gallagher, a novelist and playwright as well as a poet, currently spends time at a cottage in the west of Ireland. Gallagher also lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles.
She has published 11 volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is “Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems,” published in 2011 by Graywolf Press.
Lilley is a North Carolina poet writing and teaching in the Pacific Northwest. The most recent of his four poetry collections is “The Bushman’s Medicine Show,” published in 2017 by Lost Horse Press. He recently taught at the Centrum Foundation’s Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and The Writers’ Workshoppe.
Bowman grew up in Texas and then stopped writing for about 40 years, during which time he logged on Vancouver Island and ran a stone and jewelry business centered in Tucson, Ariz.
When writing recently returned, he subsequently moved north to Port Townsend and published “In the Octopus Nursery” in 2014.
All three poets will have books for sale at the reading.
