Patricia Killelea and I will be reading at the John Natsoulas Gallery this coming Thursday night! The event begins at 8 P.M, with an Open Mic at 9. The John Natsoulas Gallery is located at 521 1st Street. Information about the event follows below!

Join the Facebook event for this reading!

Patricia Killelea & Briony Gylgayton

A recent graduate of UC Davis, Briony Gylgayton has won multiple awards for her writing, including placing second for the University of California system-wide 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize, and placing for both creative writing categories in the 2010 Pamela Maus Contest for Creative Writing, winning first in fiction and second in poetry. Her Creative Writing Honors Thesis, a manuscript of poetry about psychological disorders, was awarded the 2010 Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Work. Briony Gylgayton will begin her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in August, 2011.

Patricia Killelea is the author of the new poetry collection Other Suns, now available from Swan Scythe Press (2011). Originally from the Bay Area, California, Patricia has placed her poems in The Seizure State, The Tule Review, and Suisun Valley Review, among others. She is currently a doctoral student in Native American Studies at the University of California at Davis, and holds an M.A. in English & Creative Writing, also from the University of California at Davis. She has taught the Introduction to Native American Literature course at UCD since Fall 2009.

Attendees are encouraged to arrive early at the John Natsoulas Gallery to secure a seat, and to sign up for a spot on the Open Mic list. The Poetry Night Reading Series, organized and hosted by Andy Jones, occurs on the first Wednesday of the month at Bistro 33, and third Thursday of every month at the John Natsoulas Gallery.

Who: Briony Gylgayton and Patricia Killelea
What: The Poetry Night Reading Series
When: Thursday, June 16th, 2011 at 8 pm
Where: John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street
Media Contact: poetryindavis@gmail.com
The John Natsoulas Gallery – 756-3938

On Friday, April 15th, the poetry reading series The Other Voice presents Briony Gylgayton and Traci Gourdine as the featured poets. The series is sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist Church of Davis, located at 27074 Patwin Road. We meet at 7:30 in the library of the church. Refreshments and open mic follow the reading.

Traci Gourdine and Briony Gylgayton

Briony Gylgayton has won multiple awards for her writing, including placing second for the University of California system-wide 2010 Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize, and placing for both creative writing categories in the 2010 Pamela Maus Contest for Creative Writing, winning first in fiction and second in poetry. Her Creative Writing Honors Thesis, a manuscript of poetry about psychological disorders, was awarded the 2010 Elliot Gilbert Memorial Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Creative Work. Her work has been published extensively in local journals, including The Tule Review, The Yolo Crow, the Blue Moon Literary and Art Review, the Suisun Valley Review, and Nameless Magazine. Briony currently works as the head of public relations for the Poetry Night Reading Series, and as a web designer for Eager Mondays, where she specializes in creating websites for poets and writers. She will begin her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa Writers Workshop this August.

Traci Gourdine’s poetry and stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has been anthologized within Shepard and Thomas’ Sudden Fiction Continued (Norton Publishing). Traci and Quincy Troupe were paired in a year long exchange of letters for the anthology Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books). She is co-editor of Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming (Candlewick Press), an anthology of writing by young Native writers, as well as We Beg to Differ, poems by Sacramento poets against the war. She has also co-edited the Tule Review with Luke Breit for the Sacramento Poetry Center. Traci Gourdine is a professor of English at American River College and chairs the Creative Writing department for the California State Summer School for the Arts. She was Chair of the Sacramento Poet Laureate Committee for four laureate terms. For ten years she facilitated writing workshops within several California state prisons.

I’m very excited for this featured reading, and hope to see you there this Friday!

For the last two years, every April I have written a poem a day to celebrate National Poetry Month and to kickstart my Spring writing. These short, mostly unedited poems are available at my In-Progress writing blog, The Spider Songs of Mister Spector. I’ll be posting some of the slightly more polished versions over here.

April Poems, 2009
April Poems, 2010

First poem of April, 2011:

There is fountain grass in my limbs
plumose flowers
that turn in my fingers like blind caterpillars.
I move my hands over boxes and tape,
move through my house
deliberately,
taking,
like a pupa moving through leaves.

I will miss my jar of flour,
my broken floor lamp,
my half-things.
I move my hands along them,
and dig my fingers into the carpet.
There are scratches near the doorframe
and holes where nails and pins went.
I will miss taking these bites.
I will miss breaching my house.
I pass my hands along my walls
as I move through my house, filling them.

I move through my house,
watering and feeding.
My bones are fountain grass
and the brushes in my bottle arms
are branching.