A new salon-style reading series showcasing the finest poetry and prose from near and far in an exquisitely appointed art-gallery setting. The featured readers for our February reading will be the poet John Gallaher and fiction writer Evelyn Somers.
Please join us on February 15th starting at 7 p.m. for 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 brought to you by Yellow Dog Bookshop; 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:
Evelyn Somers has a lifelong fixation on words, which led her to become a writer, editor, and teacher of literature. She was a staff member of the literary journal the Missouri Review for thirty-seven years, most of them as associate editor. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in journals such as Georgia Review, Copper Nickel, Southwest Review, Story, and others. Her author profiles and interviews have appeared at Bloom, where she has been a contributing editor. Work she’s edited as a journal editor has appeared in virtually every major US prize anthology; as a freelance editor, she has edited prizewinning collections and novels. Her work, and world, in progress is a group of novels linked by place (a fictionalized Midwestern town), the supernatural, and a uniquely gifted cat.
Poet and editor John Gallaher earned a BA and an MFA at Texas State University and a PhD at Ohio University. Inspired by Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, Gallaher composes searching yet often playful lyric poems engaged with the act of looking. In a 2014 Tupelo Quarterly interview with Kristina Marie Darling, Gallaher addresses his sense of what is possible within the realm of poetry, as opposed to nonfiction. “This is a topic that’s interested me since the 1980s, when I first started reading poetry seriously. Back then, a lot of the poetry I read sounded like autobiography, but there seemed to be a collective allergy to talking about it. There was this speaker who was not the poet, but who seemed an awful lot like the poet. … But the distancing of the speaker seemed to be the important thing, I guess. It’s always kind of bugged me, and I wondered what would happen if there was no distance, if I came right out and said, ‘No, it’s just me.’ No aesthetic distance. No ‘artifice.’” Later in the same interview, Gallaher expands on his aim of lessening the distance between poet and readers, stating, “Somewhere between A.R. Ammons and Robert Duncan I came across this way in, the idea that whatever happens around the poem can belong in the poem. … That idea of keeping all of one’s thinking on the page.”
Gallaher’s poetry collections include Levis Poetry Prize–winner The Little Book of Guesses (2007), Map of the Folded World (2009), Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (2011, written in collaboration with G.C. Waldrep), the book-length essay-poem In a Landscape (2014), and Brand New Spacesuit (2020). With Mary Biddinger, he edited The Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (2011), and with Laura Boss, he edited Time Is a Toy: The Selected Poems of Michael Benedikt (2014).
Gallaher is an associate professor at Northwest Missouri State University and has served as an editor for the Laurel Review and for the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics. He lives in rural Missouri.
Gallaher will be reading from his latest collection, My Life in Brutalist Architecture, "officially" out in March 2024 from Four Way Books. From the press website: "As John Gallaher prefaces this book, 'It should have been an easy story to sort out, but it took fifty years.” My Life in Brutalist Architecture confronts the truth of the author’s adoption after a lifetime of concealment and deceptions with lucid candor, startling humor, and implacable grief. Approaching identity and family history as a deliberate architecture, Gallaher’s poems illuminate how a simple exterior can obscure the structural bricolage and emotional complexity of its inner rooms.'
Remember! Parking is FREE in downtown garages after 6 p.m.! Parking is FREE all weekend long! Come join the fun! It’s good to be here!