MPC and The Marin Shakespeare Company present
Pandemic-Published Poets & Costume Celebration

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26th | 7-9PM
MARIN SHAKESPEARE COMPANY'S CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS, EDUCATION, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE - 514 FOURTH STREET, SAN RAFAEL

Join us in celebrating just a few of many MPC members (and writers everywhere!) who published books and chapbooks during the pandemic but did not properly launch those books, as we were all ‘sheltering in place.’

With Halloween around the corner, and given that our venue is a space for theatrics, we'll have a Costume Contest! See friends, support poets, get wild with your costume creativity, and immerse yourself in a community of poetry and art lovers as we celebrate these Pandemic Published Poets!

Featured Readers:

Gerald Fleming - author of 5 poetry collections, most recently, The Bastard and the Bishop (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). He taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco's public schools, edited literary magazines traditional, epistolary, and vitreous, and has written numerous books for teachers. He lives most of the year in the Far West, and, if there's no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris.

Joan Baranow- author of six poetry collections, including Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, winner of the 2021 Brick Road Press contest. Her poems have appeared in Zyzzyva, The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry East, Spillway, and elsewhere. She founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at the Dominican University of California.

Dotty LeMieux- author of four chapbooks, most recently Henceforth I Ask Not Good Fortune (Finishing Line Press). In the late 1970s to mid-1980s, she edited the eclectic literary and art journal Turkey Buzzard Review in the poetic haven of Bolinas, California. Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies. Dotty lives in Northern California, where she practices environmental law and helps elect progressive candidates to office.

Erin Rodini is the author of three poetry collections, her second collection was the winner of the Stevens Award sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her third collection won the 2020 Southern Indiana Review Michael Waters Poetry Prize and was published in the fall of 2021. Her poems, stories, and reviews have been published in such places as Best New Poets, Poetry Northwest, World Literature Today, and Sixfold, among others. She has been the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award, a Ninth Letter Literary Award, and the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. When not writing, she enjoys traveling and spending time outdoors with her daughters.

Emilie Lygren- a poet and outdoor educator who holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology-Biology from Brown University. Her first collection of poems, What We Were Born For, was published in 2021 and was selected by Young People’s Poet Laureate as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in February 2022. Emilie has also developed dozens of publications focused on nature journaling, outdoor science education, and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

David Booth is a high school humanities teacher and a poet. He also oversees the MPC newsletter. He lives in San Francisco, California, with his wife Ingrid Hawkinson. Over the years his writing has appeared in many journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Cerasus, Missouri Review, Fourteen Hills, and Washington Square. He has work forthcoming in The Rumpus and Marin Poetry Center Anthology. He blogs at www.sacredpedestrians.com. Written during the pandemic, Too Bright to See is his debut collection of poems.

This event is free. (And there will be a cash bar and concession sales to support the Marin Shakespeare Company.)