A new salon-style reading series showcasing great poetry and fiction from near and far. The first two readers featured in our series will be former Missouri Poet Laureate Walter Bargen and local fiction writer Marlene Lee reading from their latest book publications. Please join us starting at 7 p.m. for what will no doubt prove to be an insightful and inspiring evening in the arts! Readings kick off at 7:30 p.m., 30 minutes each, with a brief Q&A and book signing and sales after; beer and wine available for purchase through the gallery before and after the reading. The event will conclude at 9 pm.
More about our readers:
Walter Bargen: Walter Bargen has published nineteen books of poetry. His most recent books are: Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems (2009), Endearing Ruins (2012), Trouble Behind Glass Doors (2013), Quixotic (2014), Gone West (2014), and Three-Corner Catch (2015). He was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri (2008-2009). His awards include a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship (1991), Quarter After Eight Prose Prize (1996), the Hanks Prize (1996), the Chester H. Jones Foundation prize (1997), the William Rockhill Nelson Award (2005), Short Fiction Award– A cappella Zoo (2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in over 300 magazines, including American Literary Review, American Letters & Commentary, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, Georgia Review, International Quarterly, Missouri Review, New Letters, New Novel Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, River Styx, Seneca Review, Sycamore Review, and Witness.
Marlene Lee: When she’s not reading, playing the piano, or talking to other writers, Marlene Lee holds down a table at the Lakota Coffee House in Columbia, Missouri, confronting blank pages during business hours and postponing the inevitable with another cup of coffee.
Before writing full-time, she carted her stenotype machine from place to place (eventual settings for her fiction) in a moveable feast of reporting: Brookings, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; Chico, California; San Francisco; and New York City. She now lives in Columbia, Missouri.
Before her freelance court reporting career, she taught high school, children’s special education, Freshman and Sophomore college English, and vocational school classes in stenotype. Always and in-between, she was writing short stories and novels, accumulating publishable manuscripts before being actually published in 2013. (Lee’s fiction titles: The Absent Woman, Rebecca’s Road, Scoville, Limestone Wall, No Certain Home, published by Holland House books; and now, Inner Passage, Collected Short Stories, published by Experiments in Fiction.)
Her author page can be found at marlenelee.wordpress.com