Stayton’s Second Sunday Series of Poetry Readings will mark the holiday season with a reading and book signing by poets Michael Daley from Seattle and Ellen Waterston from Bend.
Daley and Waterson will read from their works from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 14 in the studio of artist Paul Toews at 349 N. Third Ave., which is also the location of the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore.
Daley’s book To Curve, his second poetry collection in 25 years, and Waterston’s Between Desert Seasons, her first full-length collection, will be for sale at the reading.
Admission is free, although donations are appreciated. Audience members are invited to bring one or two short poems of their own or by others to share during an open part of the reading.
Daley’s To Curve was published this past summer. Last year, a book of his writings in prose, Way Out There: Lyrical Essays, was issued by Pleasure Boat Studio. These collections follow an early book of poems, The Straits, published in 1983, and several chapbooks. Over the past two decades, Daley’s poems and essays have also been published in literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Margin, Nebraska Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Raven Chronicles, and Seattle Review.
Born in Boston, Daley worked as a laborer, taxi driver, waiter, tree-planter, editor and poet-in-the-schools, he became a high school English teacher and, later, a Fulbright Exchange teacher in Hungary. His work has been recognized with awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Seattle Arts Commission, Bumbershoot, and the Fessenden Foundation.
Waterston’s Between Desert Seasons was released Dec. 1. It follows a chapbook, I Am Madagascar, which won the WILLA Award for Poetry in 2005. Waterston’s writing reflects her experience as a New Englander who moved to the ranching west. In addition to poetry, she also writes prose fiction and non-fiction. Her memoir, Then There Was No Mountain: The Parallel Odyssey of a Mother and Daughter through Addiction, published in 2003, was named one of that year’s top 10 books in the Northwest by The Oregonian.
Her poems, short stories and essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the 2008 winner of the Oregon Quarterly Essay Competition and the 2007 recipient of the national Obsidian Prize in Poetry awarded by High Desert Journal.
In 2007, she was named an Honorary Distinguished Professor of Humane Letters by Oregon State University/ Cascades Campus. Waterston is the founder of The Writing Ranch, which supports emerging writers through workshops and retreats and director of The Nature of Words, an annual literary event held during November in Bend.
Stayton’s Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Marion Cultural Development Corporation.
For information about upcoming readings, contact series coordinator Eleanor Berry at 503-859-3045 or eberry@wvi.com.
