PORT TOWNSEND — American Romances author Rebecca Brown and poet Ilya Kaminsky will come together for a public reading of their work at Fort Worden State Park this Friday night. Admission to the 7:30 p.m. event, which caps the Centrum Autumn Writers’ Intensive, is free.
Lovers of prose and poetry are invited to join the pair in Building 262 at Fort Worden, 200 Battery Way.
Brown, whose books are out on City Lights press, is a winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Washington State Governor’s Award and a Genius award from The Stranger newspaper of Seattle.
Her American Romances is a collection of gonzo essays that put Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Nathaniel Hawthorne on the same page and reveal the secret sex life of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. Brown wrote much of the book while in residence at Centrum in Port Townsend; the book won the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn award for nonfiction in 2010.
Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1977 and arrived in the United States in 1993 when his family was granted asylum by the U.S. government.
He is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press) and winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine and other honors. Dancing was also named 2004’s Best Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord magazine, and in 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation’s Literary Fellowship.
For more information about Friday’s event and other Centrum offerings, phone 360-385-3102, ext. 131, or visit www.Centrum.org.