Poetry in motion

The Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Arts Council joins the tradition of celebrating April as National Poetry Month with first annual Poetry Month Celebration at the Shoreline Community College Campus Theatre April 19.

The Poetry Month Celebration will feature an evening with readings by three recognized Seattle-area poets: Samuel Green, Washington State Poet Laureate, Peter Pereira and Anna Maria Hong. In addition, student and adult winners of a special Poetry Month Contest will read their winning poems.

Green was recently announced by Governor Christine Gregoire as the first Washington State Poet Laureate, for a two year term that started in January. Samuel Green is a nationally recognized poet whose new book, “The Grace of Necessity,” has just been published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has called the Pacific Northwest home for nearly all his life, and lives on a remote island in the San Juans, in a hand-built log home where he and his wife Sally are publishers of Brooding Heron Press. He teaches at Seattle University, and during summer quarter in Ireland.

Pereira is a family physician and poet. He grew up in Shoreline, where he attended Shoreline high school, before enrolling at the University of Washington, where he earned degrees in Biology, English, and Medicine. His poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been widely anthologized, including in the 2007 issue of Best American Poetry. His books include What’s Written on the Body, which was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2007.

Hong is a two-time National Poetry Series finalist and recent Pushcart Prize nominee, and has published poems in journals including Fence, Black Clock, Fairy Tale Review, Cue, ARCADE, Tarpaulin Sky, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, and Crab Orchard Review. Her poems are also in the 2007 Jack Straw Writers Anthology and Limbs of the Pine, Peaks of the Range: An Anthology by Twenty-Six Pacific Northwest Poets (Rose Alley Press). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas’s Michener Center for Writers and teaches creative writing and literature at UCLA’s Writers’ Program and DigiPen Institute of Technology.

National Poetry Month was established in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets and has grown over the years into the largest literary celebration in the world.