Summer Poetry Reading at PVWW

Join us at Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop (on Zoom) on August 27th to celebrate four outstanding poets: Rage Hezekiah, Gail Thomas, Anders Carlson-Wee, and Karen Skolfield. After the reading, the event will open up to Q&A and discussion with the authors. Moderated by PVWW Founder/Director Joy Baglio and Assistant Director Kate Senecal. Please RSVP if interested at www.PioneerValleyWriters.com. FREE & OPEN TO ALL!

RAGE HEZEKIAH is a New England based poet and educator, who earned her MFA from Emerson College. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, The MacDowell Colony, and The Ragdale Foundation, and is a recipient of the Saint Botolph Foundation’s Emerging Artists Award. Her chapbook Unslakable (Paper Nautilus Press) is a 2018 Vella Chapbook Award Winner. Stray Harbor (Finishing Line Press, 2019) is her debut full-length collection of poems. Rage’s poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, TriQuarterly, ZYZZYVA, and several other journals and anthologies. You can find more of her work at ragehezekiah.com.

GAIL THOMAS is the author of four books of poetry: Odd Mercy, Waving Back, No Simple Wilderness: An Elegy for Swift River Valley, and Finding the Bear. Odd Mercy, chosen by Ellen Bass, won the Charlotte Mew Prize of Headmistress Press, and Waving Back was named a Must Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book and Honorable Mention by the New England Book Festival. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, The North American Review, Italian Americana, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Individual poems have won national prizes, and she has been a fellow at The McDowell Colony and Ucross. You may read more about her work at www.gailthomaspoet.com.

ANDERS CARLSON-WEE is the author of The Low Passions (W.W. Norton, 2019), a New York Public Library Book Group Selection as well as the 2019 Connecticut Poetry Circuit Selection. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, BuzzFeed, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other publications. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the McKnight Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he is the winner of the 2017 Poetry International Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese. Anders holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and lives in Cincinnati.

KAREN SKOLFIELD’s book Battle Dress (W. W. Norton, 2019) won the Barnard Women Poets Prize and is a Massachusetts “Must Read” selection. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry, and she is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she’s the poet laureate for Northampton, MA for 2019-2021.