When: Thursday July 8, 2021, 7:30–8:30pm CDT.
Live Music from 7:00pm to 7:30pm.
Where: Live online via Zoom, from the comfort of your own home. The Zoom invitation will be posted on the website at 6am on the morning of the reading. If you don't already have it, you should get the Zoom client installed on your device ahead of time.
Feel free to join any time from 7pm to 7:30pm. We are limited to 100 Zoom participants. The reading will be recorded and posted to YouTube afterwards; please check the website for details.
Original poems from Sharon Chmielarz, Dave Healy, Brian Thao Worra and Ranae Lenor Hanson. Musical prelude from The Gritpickers Old Time String Band.
Sharon Chmielarz was born and raised in South Dakota, three miles from the Missouri River and Standing Rock Reservation. She lives in Minnesota. Her Visibility: Ten Miles was a finalist for the 2015 Midwest Book Awards. Kirkus Reviews named both The Widow’s House and The J Horoscope among the best 100 Indie books of 2016 and 2019. Her latest book, her thirteenth, is Speaking in Riddles. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The Notre Dame Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner and The Hudson Review.
Dave Healy is a recovering academic, having taught literature and composition and directed writing centers at Bethel College (now Bethel University) and the University of Minnesota’s General College. He edited The Writing Center Journal, Public Art Review, and the Park Bugle, a community newspaper. His poetry and essays have been published in The Minneapolis Review of Baseball, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Turtle Quarterly, New Plains Review, Dash, Voices for the City, and Minnesota Memories. He and his wife, Nancy, live in a 111-year-old house in St. Paul. In over 60 years as a baseball fan, he has never once caught a foul ball.
Brian Thao Worra is the Lao Minnesotan poet Laureate and the author of On The Other Side Of The Eye, Touching Detonations, Winter Ink, Barrow and The Tuk Tuk Diaries: My Dinner With Cluster Bombs. He is the first Laotian American to receive a Fellowship in Literature from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received the Asian Pacific Leadership Award from the State Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans for Leadership in the Arts; the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Elgin Award for Book of the Year; and was selected a Cultural Olympian representing Laos in the London Summer Games. He is the first Asian American president of the international Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, and the first Laotian American member of the professional Horror Writers Association.
Ranae Lenor Hanson, educator and climate activist, taught writing and global studies at Minneapolis College for thirty-one years. Her roots among a community of story-tellers in the northeastern wilderness watersheds of Minnesota, plus the lives and stories of her students, and her diagnosis in adulthood of Type 1 diabetes, have all taught her ways that bodies parallel ecosystems. Her BA is in literature and writing; her PhD in cross-cultural education. Watershed, Attending to Body and Earth in Distress, her meditation on intimate connections between bodily health and biome health, came out last month from the University of Minnesota Press.
The Gritpickers Old Time String Band weaves hot fiddle-and-banjo tunes with songs that feature terrific two- and three-part harmonies. Sets are peppered with stories and humor that adds a grin to the toes already tapping in the room. They play for weddings, dances, block parties, restaurant shows, community events, garage door openers, and other hallmark cultural events. What’s a Gritpicker? They are Don Jacques on fiddle and guitar, Rob Daves on banjo and Gene Willms on guitar. They thrill concert audiences, dancers and wedding parties alike with old time string band music. Listen to their CD, Harmony Grits, on CDBaby.com/TheGritpickers. Visit them on Facebook. Their CD is available on CDBaby.com, and iTunes, and by contacting them at gritpickers@gmail.com.
Before and after: Both Milkweed, downstairs from our usual venue, and Merlin’s Rest, a bar/restaurant 3 blocks west where Midstream attendees often congregate, are once again open.
