Featured News | June 3, 2015
From the Teton County Library in Jackson:
Teton County Library invites the community to participate in a free writing workshop and poetry reading with Idaho poet Bethany Schultz Hurst, who will look at poetry’s ability to simultaneously inhabit multiple narratives. As poet David Baker says, “no single position is ever sufficient to articulate our lives, but rather we are always in several places at once.”
How can poetry take narratives from two different time periods, locations, or cultural experiences and weave them together into a meaningful expression? To explore that question and guide the conversation, Schultz Hurst will share the work of contemporary poets, such as Mary Szybist, Afaa Michael Weaver, Kathleen Graber and David Baker.
Schultz Hurst will also read poems from her collection “Miss Lost Nation” (Anhinga, 2014) along with new poems from her book-in-progress, “Our Feral Children.” The poems explore relationships between place and identity: how is our sense of who we are impacted by what we call home? The poems often weave together seemingly disparate narratives – comic books and forest fires, Abraham Lincoln and bathroom remodels – as they explore whether our homes and our identities, particularly in the American West, are as sturdy as we’d like to think.
Adult Summer Reading
This poetry workshop and reading is part of Teton County Library’s Summer Reading program for adults. Whether reading for leisure or to learn, the Library invites adults to record each hour they read this summer and enter weekly Summer Reading drawings to win prizes. Adult Summer Reading also features a slate of authors, writing workshops and book giveaways. Sign up begins June 13: www.tclib.org/read
Presenter’s Bio
Bethany Schultz Hurst’s poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Gettysburg Review, River Styx, Sixth Finch and other journals. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University. She lives in Pocatello, Idaho, with her husband and son, and teaches creative writing at Idaho State University.
This workshop is free and open to the community with support from donations, large and small, to the Teton County Library Foundation.
You can find Teton County Library online at www.tclib.org, call us at 307.733.2164 or visit us at 125 Virginian Lane, Jackson WY
The Wyoming Arts Council believes that experiencing the arts should be accessible for all, including people with mental and/or physical disabilities, older adults, military/veterans, people living in institutions and those who lack access to the arts due to geographic isolation, cultural difference and economic hardship.
