The Poetry Box LIVE – September Edition!
Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)
3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)
Featuring:
- Sheila Sondik (WA) – author of Lighting Up the Duff
- Kim Peter Kovac (VA) – author of A Bit Left of Straight Ahead
- Sher Schwartz (OR) – author of The Beautiful One’s Ark
Enjoy the Video from the Show:
About the Featured Poets:
Sheila Sondik, poet and printmaker, explores moments in time and space that the casual observer might overlook. Both artforms are opportunities for her to work with the unexpected. Prints are always mirror images of the drawings on the printing plates and, in writing Golden Shovels, the poet knows the last word of a line before the rest of it is written. Sheila has always enjoyed word puzzles and has been a member of the National Puzzlers’ League since 2000. She lived in Berkeley, CA, with its lively literary scene centered in its world-famous bookstores, for over 30 years after graduating from Harvard. In 2008, she moved to Bellingham, Washington in search of new landscapes and was happy to find a welcoming community of prolific poets. Her first chapbook, Fishing a Familiar Pond: Found Poems from The Yearling, was published by Egress Studio Press in 2013. Her Western and Japanese style poetry appear in many journals and anthologies.
You can learn more about Sheila’s chapbook HERE
Kim Peter Kovac began writing poetry in 2012, toward the end of his career in national and international theater for young audiences (TYA), starting work on his first Poetry Barn asynchronous online workshop on the plane home from a festival in Okinawa, just barely beating a typhoon.
He has commissioned and produced 100+ new TYA plays and musicals as Artistic Director of Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, including from Pulitzer Prize and Tony award winning playwrights and composers.
Kim co-founded and co-produced (with Deirdre Kelly Lavrakas) the Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices, an award-winning program that assisted in the development of 111 new plays, musicals, and operas from 97 playwrights and 38 composers, working with 61 U.S. and 12 international theater companies. He spent 12 years on the governing board of ASSITEJ, the international TYA association, with national centers in 80+ countries, and currently works as part of the leadership team and webmaster for Write Local Play Global, the international network for writers of new work for young audiences, with members in 50+ countries.
Kim’s first poetry collection, Border Sounds: Poem & Dispatches from Other Timezones, was published in January 2021. He also has 150+ pieces in print and online in journals from Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the USA. He has a BA in Theatre from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.
You can learn more about Kim’s book HERE
Sher A. Schwartz is a published essayist, poet, old time fiddle musician, singer, and retired professor. She was born in Georgia, raised in Virginia, and spent many summers in rural West Virginia with her mother’s family. Her vocal training, beginning at twelve, and later rhythm guitar playing in an old-time string band laid the foundation for the musicality in Schwartz’s poetry. Schwartz has written country and mountain folk songs and composed classical hymns. She lived for many years in a cabin on the beach in Alaska while teaching in the humanities department at the University of Alaska in Ketchikan. Her band Red Hoochie and the Tomcods played at festivals and events around Southeast Alaska.
In 2011, she retired from academic life and moved to Eastern Oregon, where she’s trained and competed with her hunting dogs, and helped restore two hundred acres on an old farm to native grasslands and pollinator plants. Schwartz has continued to perform with the old-timey Sugar Hill Band throughout the Columbia River Gorge though she writes more poetry these days than songs and essays.
You can learn more about Sher’s chapbook HERE
