Please join me at the following reading (I”ll be in the audience):

Oregon Literary Review co-hosts First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 4323 NE Fremont, Portland, Oregon, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over. Contact Julie Mae Madsen at maemadsen@gmail.com for more information. 

The readers for March 3 are Mark Thalman, John Blackard, Penelope Schott, and Pedro Ponce.

Pedro Ponce is the author of two chapbooks of short fiction, Superstitions of Apartment Life (Burnside Review Press) and Alien Autopsy (Willows Wept Press). His fiction has appeared in numerous journals and been anthologized in The Beacon Best of 2001, You Have Time for This: Contemporary American Short-Short Stories, DIAGRAM: The Second Print Anthology, and Sudden Fiction Latino.

John Blackard is a graduate of the University of North Carolina with advanced degrees in English Studies and Library Information Studies. He has three books of poems in print. The most recent,  Pulling Apart, appeared in January. He has received Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in Portland with his wife, the poet Valentina Gnup, and recently served as associate editor of Poetry Northwest.

Mark Thalman’s book Catching the Limit is published by Bedbug Press – Fairweather Books (2009) and is part of their Northwest Poetry Series. Thalman’s poetry has appeared in Carolina Quarterly, CutBank, Many Mountains Moving, Pedestal Magazine, Pennsylvania Review, and Verse Daily among others.  He received his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon, and he teaches English in the public schools.

Penelope Scambly Schott’s newest books are Six Lips  and a chapbook Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tia in which she is picked on by a harshly philosophical magpie..  In 2008 Penelope received the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.