Tacoma Community College invites you to celebrate National Poetry Month with Poetry in the Harbor, a reading event and class featuring four area poets. The poets will share their work with the audience, then participate in a panel Q&A session where attendees learn more about their creative processes.
The event takes place from 6 to 9 p.m. on April 18 at the TCC Gig Harbor Campus, located at 3993 Hunt Street NW. Registration fee is $25. Organizers highly encourage registering in advance at tacomacc.edu/tcc-life/events/pith as tickets at the door will be limited.
Participating Poets
Asha Berkes is a poet and educator from Tacoma. They are the director for educational partnerships for Write253 and teach poetry at Tacoma School of the Arts. Find them riding a bike around town or sitting by the Sound gluing leaves into their journal.
Kathleen Byrd was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and has lived in Olympia for over 30 years. She is a mother, daughter, sister, auntie and writing teacher at South Puget Sound Community College. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Western Washington University. Her poetry explores insights garnered from deep relationships to place, attention to dreams and a longing for matrilineal wisdom, and has appeared in numerous publications. Byrd’s chapbook collection, “Hold the Babies,” was a finalist for Finishing Line Press Emerging Women’s Voices chapbook contest. She was awarded a Sue Boynton Poetry Award in Bellingham in 2021 and is the current poet laureate of Olympia.
Josie Emmons Turner lives on a beautiful estuary feeding into Gig Harbor with her show dog, Gabbie. Her poems are most recently published in “The Madrona Project IV: The Empty Bowl Cookbook,” “The Madrona Project V: Art in a Public Voice” and “Now That You Are Gone from This World” (Poet’s Choice). She has taught poetry workshops to youth and adults and is a contributor to WestSound Magazine. Turner gardens, practices French cooking and is a former Tacoma poet laureate.
Michael Haeflinger is the author of “Low Static Rage” (Blue Cactus Press, 2019), the chapbooks “The Days Before” and “Love Poem for the Everyday” (Dog On A Chain Press, 2014 and 2011) and the audio book “Let’s Don’t Be Crazy” (2016). He lives in Tacoma.
Emcee Allen Braden is the author of “A Wreath of Down,” “Drops of Blood” and “Elegy in the Passive Voice.” He has published in The Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Republic, The Hudson Review, Orion and elsewhere. His writing has received awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a writer’s residency at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Braden has taught at Tacoma Community College since 2000.
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