Announcing the Get Lit! Kids and YA Headliners!

Announcing the 2013 Youth Headliners

Patricia McCormick is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of five critically acclaimed young adult novels, including Never Fall Down, the story of a young Cambodian boy whose musical talent proves to be his sole chance of surviving the Khmer Rouge. Joining her will be Emily Danforth, author of the widely acclaimed novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post. This event will be free and open to the public. Saturday, April 13, 11:30 am, Spokane Public Library Downtown Branch.

Rebecca Stead is the Newbery Award-winning author of When You Reach Me and First Light. Her newest book, Liar & Spy, is a story about spies, games, and friendship. The story centers on seventh-grader Georges, his eccentric new homeschooled friends, and an apartment building spy mystery that needs to be solved. This event will be free to all youth; tickets for adult general admission are available through TicketsWest. Sunday, April 14, 11:30 am, Bing Crosby Theater.

Get your Get Lit! Festival Passes Now
Buy a pass and save $20-$25 off individual ticket costs and service fees.

Eastern Washington University’s 15th Annual Get Lit! Festival will feature over 50 events including author presentations and readings, writing workshops, panel discussions, poetry slams and writing contests. A Festival Pass gets you in to see the all of the headlining events: Jonathan Evison and Kim Barnes on Thursday, April 11; Joyce Carol Oates, Jaimy Gordon, and David Shields on Friday, April 12; Major Jackson and Robert Wrigley on Saturday, April 13; and Rebecca Stead on Sunday, April 14. The Festival Pass is regularly priced at $45, saving you $20-$25 off individual ticket costs and convenience charges. Individual tickets can also be purchased for each of the headlining events for $15. (Note: Students get in to all headlining events free with current ID.) 

Author Spotlight: Major Jackson
Join Major Jackson and Robert Wrigley for a conversation about poetry.

Major Jackson is an American poet, a professor of creative writing, the author of three poetry collections, and the Poetry Editor for the Harvard Review. His work has earned him the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize as well as the honor of being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the NAACP Image Award. He has taught in the graduate MFA programs at Columbia University and New York University. He lives in Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont. While his earlier works consisted mostly of long narrative poems, Holding Company signals a creative evolution with its concise ten-line lyrical poems and ecstatic tone.

“True enough,/he wanted a row of filaments inside like Times Square./The sockets were dead” –Lying

Poetry Out Loud Regional Final
Learn more about the National Poetry Out Loud Competition here.

Thursday, February 7th, Get Lit! Programs hosted the Eastern Washington Poetry Out Loud Regional Final at the Bing Crosby Theater. Students from nine regional high schools recited classical and contemporary poetry for a chance to proceed to the state finals and get one step closer to becoming national champion. Tom Zbyszewski from Liberty Bell High School won the competition with his incredible performances of “Golden Retrievals” by Mark Doty and “Famous” by Naomi Shihab Nye. Langston Ward from Mead High School, last year’s state champion, placed second with stirring recitations of “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee and “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest and the Road Unknown” by Walt Whitman. Both Zbyszewski and Ward will compete in the state finals in Tacoma on March 9. 

For more information about this year's festival, visit our website.

Tom Wayman Reading at Riverpoint

Get Lit! Programs and Eastern Washington University's Visiting Writers Series are pleased to announce author Tom Wayman will be reading in the Phase 1 Auditorium at Riverpoint this Friday, February 22nd, at 7:30pm. The event will be free and open to the public.

Wayman is the author of 18 collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, and the novel Woodstock Rising (2009). He'll be sharing work from his latest collection of poetry, Dirty Snow (2012).

About Dirty Snow:

Tom Wayman's newest collection of poems, Dirty Snow, unflinchingly considers the impact of the Afghan War: its absence and presence in Canadians' everyday lives as citizens of a nation at war. The collection explores Wayman's view that Canada's military intervention in a civil war between two odious sets of combatants has degraded Canadians' quality of life by, among other means, the conflict's relentless absorption of public funds in pursuit of dubious ends...

Upcoming Poetry Out Loud Regional Final

It's almost here.

On Thursday, February 7, students from nine regional high schools will compete in the Eastern Washington Poetry Out Loud Regional Final, hosted by Get Lit! Programs. Two winners will be chosen to proceed to the State Finals in Tacoma where they'll be one step closer to becoming the 2013 National Champion.

The Regional Final will take place at the Bing Crosby Theater from 7:00 to 9:00 pm and will include the school winners from the following high schools: Central Valley, The Community School, East Valley, Lakeside, Liberty Bell, Mead, Medical Lake, The Oaks, and Okanogan. The competition will take place in two rounds, with participants reciting one poem for each round.

Poetry Out Loud Regional Final

Thursday, February 7, 7-9 pm

The Bing Crosby Theater

Free and open to the public

Now in its eighth year, Poetry Out Loud is a national arts education program that encourages the mastery of great poetry by offering educational materials and a dynamic competition to high schools across the country. The competition begins at the classroom level, progressing through school-wide, regional, and state competitions and culminating in the National Finals in Washington, DC. More than 250,000 students across the country are expected to take part in Poetry Out Loud this year.

Mortal Geography: Alexandra Teague at EWU

 
The Inland Northwest Center for Writers and Get Lit! Programs are proud to present the first event in the 2012-2013 EWU Visiting Writer series, featuring poet Alexandra Teague. 

Tomorrow evening, on Friday, October 26th, Teague will be reading from her collection Mortal Geography at the EWU Riverpoint Campus, in the Phase 1 Auditorium, at 7pm.  

If Spokane's been getting too frosty for you, a reading is the perfect place to thaw. And remember, nothing inspires brilliant poetry like bleak weather.


The Heartland

In the beginning was snow, fluffy and colored
like cabbage. Pale green leaves of light
folded in toward the ground.

We who were from nowhere
changed zip codes often, moving
into uncertain weather. The sameness of change

never ceased to astound us. Blocks away,
the American Ice Company’s red bricks
melted to white. It was possible to believe

a whole city’s snow came from inside.
Sidewalks turned into tightropes. The sky waited.
We all had something we’d rather stayed buried.

We all had something staked on the thaw.
One morning, the mailbox backed up
with forwards, which overflowed

down the steps. We’d been located by names
that chapped our lips when we said them.
Ice hung from the gutters of the art museum

like sculptures. People paid to stay outside.
Shovels made soft sweeps, brushes
across the unalterable, as men poured salt

to our doorstep, a great evaporated sea.
The papers tallied up deaths
and reported freezing was variable.

In Houston, people start dying
when the temperature drops below thirty,
while in Anchorage, death starts

at minus five. We had become
the midpoint of a mortal geography.


From Alexandra Teague's Mortal Geography 

 

Pacific Walkers: A New Collection from Nance Van Wickel

Anticipation is building for Nance Van Winckel's forthcoming poetry collection, Pacific Walkers (2013).

The collection takes its name from the brand of shoes worn by a John Doe, one in a series of unidentified bodies found during Van Winckel's time as a reporter. The poems give voice to the nameless and forgotten--from the anonymous deceased to the portraits in discarded photo albums.

 

Nance Van Winckel is the author of five collections of poetry and three collections of short stories. She is a two-time National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient. You can find more information about her here.

Upcoming Alexandra Teague Poetry Readings

Alexandra Teague, author of Mortal Geography (2010), will be featured at two upcoming readings!

The Beacon Hill Reading Series

Thursday, October 25^th

The Hagan Foundation Center at SCC

6:30pm

EWU’s Visiting Writers Series

Friday, October 26^th

Riverpoint Campus, Phase 1 Auditorium

7:00pm

 

Alexandra Teague is a former Stegner Fellow and NEA Fellow whose poetry has appeared in Best New Poets 2008 and Best American Poetry 2009, as well as many notable journals, including The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Her debut collection, Mortal Geography, won both the 2009 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and the 2010 California Book Award. Drawing from sources as diverse as travelogue, ESL, and Dungeons and Dragons, Mortal Geography keeps readers on their toes with its balancing act of chaos and structure. Poems about the madness of public transportation appear in sonnet form while poems about love take on unexpected forms, as in this mindbender, "Two Drafts Written After a Fight":

I.

Do I love you: yes or no?
The question: Is love a figure of speech?

I do - sometimes. Everyone wonders about our love; still,
there can be no doubt I have been true (almost always).

Happily remembering the start of our romance; it seemed
so promising ...

And is love continual happiness or not?
Is not what matters?

I cannot tell you who I want to spend my life with.
Enough about our love.


II.

Do I love you? Yes or no - the question is, love,
a figure of speech. I do.

(Sometimes everyone wonders.)
About our love, still, there can be no doubt.

I have been true, almost always happily
remembering the start of our romance;

it seemed so promising, and is. Love,
continual happiness or not is not what matters.

I cannot tell you, who I want to spend my life with,
enough about our love.



What else is there to say? This is not a poet to miss.

Jonathan Potter and Travis Laurence Naught

Auntie's Bookstore in Spokane, WA is famous for bringing in amazing authors to read, discuss, and socialize with those interested in the writer's craft. This Thursday, May 10, will be no different as both Jonathan Potter and Travis Laurence Naught visit Auntie's to read from their work and share their views on the craft of poetry.

Jonathan Potter will be speaking about his first book of poems, House of Words. Published by Korrectiv Press, the poems laid upon these pages spin theories of words and of life--indeed, the whole book is dedicated to his wife and the celebration of their marriage. The simple gray cover of House of Words--a farmhouse settled in a quiet field--offers an eerie quality to the book, but there is nothing otherwordly about these poems, only images of beauty, struggle, and devotion are ignited once you begin to read.

The Virgin Journals depicts Travis Laurence Naught's experiences on living life as a quadriplegic. His poems challenge the reader to forget about physical disabilities, about anything that can hold one back from what is truly beautiful in life. Separated into three elements--Life, Love, and the World--Naught is able to deliver truth in every word. His raw perspective of the world eliminates any sugar-coating, and he is unafraid and unapologetic throughout every piece.

Lost Horse Press Reading at the MAC

Lost Horse Press, a nonprofit and independent press, will be hosting a reading during the Get Lit! Festival on Friday, April 13 at 3:00 p.m. at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

The poets include:

Carlos Reyes is a poet and translator that lives in Portland, Oregon. He was honored with the Heinrich Boll Fellowship in 2007, which allowed him to write on Achill Island in Ireland. In 2009, he was poet-in-resident at the Lost Horse Ranger Station in Joshua Tree National Park. He recently was a writer-in-residence at the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska. He is known for his simplistic poems that distract from the complexity of subject matter. The Book of Shadows, his latest collection, is comprised of poems that he has written over the past thirty years.

David Axelrod is a poet of five collections, one of which won the Spokane Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Also, he has published a collection of cultural and environmental essays about the rural northwest. His poems and essays have appeared in New Letters, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Tampa Review, Willow Springs Review, The Prose Poem, among others. He is an editor for Basalt: a Journal of Fine and Literary Arts and teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Eastern Oregon University. His most recent collection is How to Apologize.

Carolyne Wright has been a poet and translator for over forty years. She has published eight books and chapbooks, including a memoir about her experience in Chile, and contributed to three anthologies. Her most recent book, A Change of Maps, was nominated for the LA Times Book Awards. She has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, Seattle Arts Commission, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Maya Jewell Zeller is an Eastern alumni. Her book of poetry Rust Fish evokes memories and bonds with the poems that readers will remember for years. Her poetry has won awards from The Florida Review and Crab Orchard Review, and appears widely. She currently lives in Spokane with her husband, daughter, and newest child on the way, while she teaches at Gonzaga University.

J.T. Ledbetter has a B.A. in English from California State University, and a M.A. and Ph.D in English from the University of Nebraska. His poetry can be found in many journals including Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Louisville Review, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry, among others. His newest collection of poems, Old and Lost Rivers, will be launched at the Get Lit! festival.

D.S. Butterworth, a Seattle native, currently teaches Literature and Creative Writing at Gonzaga University. Author Jess Walter noted that Butterworth's book, The Radium Watch Dial Painters is "a book of sheer power and range, poems that burn in brilliant flashes and with searing luminescence. There are great stories in here, flurries of fresh images and graceful turns of music and wit. Above all, you find Dan Butterworth’s pitch-perfect gift for language, his acrobatic intelligence, his fierce decency. I loved this book.”

Melissa Kwasny often draws her inspiration from the natural world. She has written four books of poetry, two novels, and edited an anthology of poets on the art of poetry. The Nine Senses, her latest collection, is comprised entirely of prose poems.

What: Lost Horse Press Reading

Where: Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (2316 W. First Ave., Spokane)

When: Friday, April 13 2012 3:00 PM

Cost: FREE!

More Information:

Visit Get Lit!

Poem of the Week by Elizabeth Austen

House Fire

I reach for my yellow dress. It bursts
into flame. Anything I remember
burns again. Recipes from Nana's walnut box,
father's letters, every photograph: all
the same black exhalation-
the remains of everything consumed
coat the remains of everything spared.
Memories reduced to images without
objects to anchor them hover
in the space between this morning-
when each room stood intact-
and now, a time without geography.
Nothing ties me to the past.
No family portraits, no letters
urging goodness, steadiness, obedience.
All the old imperatives
curl in the lingering heat.


Elizabeth Austen is a Seattle-based poet, performer, and teacher. As part of the 2012 Get Lit! Festival, Austen will be one of the readers at the first ever Pie & Whiskey Reading at 9:30 p.m. at the Woman's Club on Thursday, 12. She will also be participating in the panel From Vinegar Bottles to Verse: Discovering Poetry in Overlooked Objects on Friday, April 13 at 12:30 p.m. at the SFCC Spartan Theater and later that night, she will be reading and discussing her work at the Poetry Salon at the Rocket Bakery. And aspiring performance poets, don't miss out on your chance to work directly with her during her Saturday workshop Beyond the Page: Poems Aloud, Poems Alive.

Get Lit!'s Poetry Salon

The Get Lit! Festival is having an informal poetry salon, modeled after the salons of early 20th century Paris. The event will consist of a reading and discussion by six poets hosted by Eastern Washington University's Creative Writing professor Jonathan Johnson. Each of the poets will discuss their craft and their writing life.

The poets include:

Elizabeth Austen, a Seattle poet, performer, and teacher will be reading from her book Every Dress a Decision. She has produced literary programming for one of Seattle's NPR affiliates, KUOW, which introduces recordings of the Pacific Northwest literary events and interviews local and national poets.
Click here to watch Elizabeth Austen read from her book, Every Dress a Decision.

Thomas Brush is an author of three poetry collections and his work has appeared in journals such as Poetry, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and The North American Review. He established a literary magazine called Better Days, along with a reading series, while teaching English at Kent-Meridian High School. Brush’s forthcoming poetry collection Last Night, winner of the 2011 Blue Lynx Prize, includes poetry from the last twenty years about his childhood, his current reflections on the world, and the places he delights in and lives in.

Molly Tenenbaum has three full-length poetry collections: The Cupboard Artist (2012), Now (2007), and By a Thread (2000), as well as chapbooks Blue Willow, Old Voile, and Story, and single poems in many journals. She has held residencies at Hedgebrook and at the Helen Riaboff Whiteley Center, participated in the Jack Straw Writers’ Program, and was awarded a 2009 Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship.

Kathryn Smith is an EWU MFA alum, a copy editor for the Spokesman-Review, a master gardener in training, and a community volunteer. According to Mary Oliver, Smith tries to "keep my mind on what matters, / which is my work, / which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished."

Kathleen Flenniken was recently named the Washington State Poetry Laureate and her second collection of poetry, Plume, was selected for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series. Her first collection of poems, Famous, winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize, was named a 2007 Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Russell Thorburn enjoys having a successful career as a poet, teacher, and radio hour writer. He writes poems about “fighting against the silence” based on his personal life journey. He repeatedly includes a character named Agent X who time travels to sorrowful and gratifying moments in Thorburn’s life. Thorburn has compared Agent X to Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim.   

What: Poetry Salon

Where: Rocket Bakery (1325 W. First Ave., Spokane)

When: Friday, April 13 2012 9:00 PM

Cost: FREE!

More Information:

Visit Get Lit!

Spokane Student Wins Washington State Poetry Out Loud Competition

Everyone on the Get Lit! Programs staff would like to congratulate Mead High School junior Langston Ward on winning the Washington State Poetry Out Loud championship. 

For winning the state competition, Ward received $200 in scholarships, a $500 stipend for the purchase of poetry books for his school, and an all expenses-paid trip to represent Washington State in the National Finals, May 13-15, in Washington, DC.  

The National Finals will award a total of $50,000 in scholarships, school stipends, with a $20,000 college scholarship for the Poetry Out Loud National Champion.

We all wish him luck and congratulate him on his state title!

Poetry Out Loud is a competition that encourages high school students to learn the complexity and beauty of poetry through memorization and public recitation. Get Lit! Programs serves as the coordinator for the region of Eastern Washington.

To watch a video of Langston Ward reciting "I am the Mob, the People" by Carl Sandburg at last year's state competition, visit the Washington State Art Commission's website here.

Broken Mic

Do you have a fear of public speaking? Did you know the best way to overcome a fear is to attack it head-on?

Stop by the Neato Burrito on Wednesdays for Broken Mic and read some of your work in an open-mic setting. Poetry, spoken word, fiction, and nonfiction are all welcome. If you don't feel the need to overcome your fear, that's cool too. Come by and support those who built up the courage to do so. Enjoy a burrito or two, no one will judge. Here's an article by The Inlander about a past event: Writer's Bloc.

What: Broken Mic
Where: Neato Burrito (827 W. 1st Ave., Spokane)
When: Every Wednesday 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Cost: FREE
More Information: (509) 847-1234

Poem of the Week by Jan Heller Levi

Hanging out the Laundry to Dry

The sun is high in the sky,
vivid, livid, but kind. When the Master makes His appearance, He
doesn't always

shine. I say the sad music, the music like water, the music that makes
Buddha
anxious, the flip of the tuxedo tails when the Master

polishes His behind.
I want to be happy, will be too, wearing somebody's socks,
nobody's shoes.

Jan Heller Levi is the author of Once I Gazed at You in Wonder, winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is the editor of A Muriel Rukeyser Reader and coeditor of Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan. Her other honors include the George Bogin Memorial Award and the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine Award, both from the Poetry Society of America. She currently teaches at the Hunter College Graduate Program in Creative Writing.

The above poem and information comes from Levi's 2005 collection, Skyspeak.

Only Time Will Tell

The Spokane Arts Commission and Riverspeak invite you to join them tonight at 6:00 p.m. for live performances of poetry and short film in the City Council Chambers as part of "Only Time Will Tell," an art and poetry exhibition currently on display in the Chase Gallery.

Featured performers include EWU Riverpoint librarian Jonathan Potter, EWU MFA alum Jennifer Taylor, Eighty Six, Issac Grambo, Jill Skeie, Danielle Von Lehe, David Wakefield, Ryan Weech and others. See video by Aaron Fink, Rajah Bose, and Tiffany Patterson. Come for surprising poetry, energetic film and fun!

What: Only Time Will Tell
When: February 17, 6:00 p.m.
Where: City Council Chambers (808 W. Spokane Falls Blvd.)
Cost: Free and open to the public

Release Party of Ray Amorosi's "Gnawing on a Thin Man"

Join Willow Springs Editions in celebrating the release of Ray Amorosi's chapbook of new poetry, Gnawing on a Thin Man, this Friday at 7:00 p.m. at The Kress Gallery. Entry is $10, which includes a copy of the book as well as a raffle ticket for prizes from local businesses. The night will also feature music and dessert catered by Twigs Bistro.

Published by Willow Springs Editions, Gnawing on a Thin Man "resonates with a kind of contemplative darkness and offers the reader vivid and haunting images on a myriad of themes, including spirituality, relationships, and nature."

Amorosi has had poems published in The American Poetry Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Crazyhorse, Willow Springs, The Iowa Review, and many other literary magazines and journals.

What: Release of Ray Amorosi's Gnawing on a Thin Man!

Where: Kress Gallery, River Park Square, Level 3 (808 W. Main Ave., Spokane)

When: Friday, February 10th 2012 7:00 PM

Cost: $10 (Includes a copy of book and raffle ticket, more tickets $1 each)

Poem of the Week by Stephen Spender

This week's selection is one of the poems performed by the winner of last week's Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals, Langston Ward from Mead High School.

The Truly Great

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

Sir Stephen Spender was born in London and attended Oxford University, where he became friends with the poet W. H. Auden. Auden convinced Spender that poets should find their material in the everyday world and in seemingly unpoetic things. In his poetry, Spender creates tension between the need to engage this world and a desire to transcend it.

Content from Poetry Out Loud.

Poetry Out Loud!

Join us tonight for the Eastern Washington Poetry Out Loud Regional Finals. Student winners of their school competition from Deer Park, East Valley, Liberty Bell, Mead, The Oaks Academy, and Okanogan high schools will be competing from 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. at the Lewis & Clark High School auditorium.

The competition, presented in partnership with The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, is part of a national program that encourages high school students to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation. The winner of the regional finals will go on to compete at the state finals in March at Tacoma, where students have the chance to win scholarship money and a stipend for their school to use to purchase poetry books for the library.

Where: Lewis and Clark High School auditorium (521 W. 4th Ave., Spokane)
When: Thursday, February 2nd, 5:00 p.m.
Cost: FREE

Ongoing Poetry and Nonfiction Workshop

Not sure how to end your poem? Perhaps you have a nonfiction essay but something isn't just right?

Sounds like you need to check out the Community Writing Workshop at Eastern Washington University. Run by current MFA students, the poetry and nonfiction workshop will be held every Wednesday at the EWU Cheney campus at 5:30 p.m. this quarter. And best of all, it's free!

What: Community Writing Workshop for poetry and nonfiction
Where: Pence Union Building, Room 263 @ Eastern Washington University (Cheney)
When: Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m.
Cost: FREE
More Information: Contact Tim(poetry) at tgrassley@gmail.com or Brian(nonfiction) at bpietrus@eagles.ewu.edu

Poem of the Week by Jane Hirshfield

Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight

I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.

Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.

I heard myself thinking,
It isn't the piano, it isn't the ears.

Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.

Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.

Jane Hirshfield's books of poetry include Come, Thief (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets. She was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012.

To read more work by Jane, visit poets.org

National Book Festival features Poetry Out Loud students

This past weekend an estimated 200,000 people attended the 2011 National Book Festival, a two day celebration of the literary arts organized by the Library of Congress. This year's festival not only featured over a hundred award winning writers like Toni Morrison, Dave Eggers, and Garrison Keillor, but also showcased three talented high school students who were 2011 finalists for the national Poetry Out Loud competition.

Get Lit! is proud to be the Poetry Out Loud host and coordinator for the Eastern Washington area. With the new school year underway, we're looking forward to another year of impressive recitations and inspiring performances from our local high school students. We'd love to see one of our students on the line up for next year's National Book Festival!

For more information about Poetry Out Loud, click here. Get Lit! will be hosting a teacher development workshop (with available clock hours) for any high school teachers in the region who want to learn more about how to integrate Poetry Out Loud into their classroom and prepare their students for the competition. The workshop will be held on October 26 from 4:00 PM - 7:00 PM at the Spokane Riverpoint Campus. For more information, please contact us at getlit@ewu.edu.