Indigenous People’s Day ~ Honoring Women’s Voices
Native Nations poets Laura Da’, Ruby Hansen Murray, Leah Altman, Alise Sanchez and a youth poet
October 14, 2019 from 4pm to 6pm
Old Liberty Theater, 115 N Main Avenue, Ridgefield, WA 98642
Free

The public is invited to join us at the Old Liberty Theater in Ridgefield, Washington to celebrate our First Nations People through poetry, prose and music. As a community we will gather to honor the Indigenous People on whose traditional and ancestral land we sit and in acknowledgment that many Indigenous Nations of the Columbia River have connections to this place and their descendants live on. Our honored guests will include Tanna Engdahl, Spiritual Leader of the Cowlitz Tribe. She will offer a blessing for the gathering, which will honor Indigenous Women.

Native Nations women poets Laura Da’, Ruby Hansen Murray, Leah Altman, Alise Sanchez and a youth poet will read their work. Traveling Day Society, an inter-tribal and multi-cultural blend of musicians utilizing the voices of the Drum and the Native American Flute will join community members to drum at the event. This celebration is free and open to the public of all ages.

A poet and a public-school teacher, Laura Da’ studied creative writing at the University of Washington and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is the author of the collections Instruments of the True Measure (University of Arizona Press, 2018), winner of the 2019 Washington Book Award and Tributaries (University of Arizona Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 American Book Award as well as the chapbook The Tecumseh Motel. Her work has appeared in the anthologies New Poets of Native Nations (Graywolf Press, 2018) and Effigies II (Salt Publishing, 2014). A member of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, she received a Native American Arts and Cultures Fellowship in Literature. Da’ has also been a Made at Hugo House fellow and a Jack Straw fellow. She lives near Seattle, Washington, with her family.

Ruby Hansen Murray is a citizen of the Osage Nation, who lives downriver on Puget Island. She’s an award-winning columnist for the Osage News, and has offered writing workshops at the Port Townsend Writers Conference, Mt. Edgecumbe Boarding School in Sitka, Alaska and the American Indian Center in Chicago. She writes about the idiosyncrasies of Osage family life and confronts stereotypes that render Natives invisible. Her work appears in Exquisite Vessel: Shapes of Native Nonfiction by Elissa Washuta & Terese Warburton (2019), and World Literature Today, CutBank and The Rumpus. She received an MFA from The Institute of American Indian Arts.

Leah Altman (Oglala Lakota/Persian) is a Native writer and poet from the Portland area. She has been writing and performing poetry since she was 8 years old. Leah was most recently published in an anthology of local Portland writers entitled Where the Roses Grow Best, and she has performed most recently on KBOO with local Native writers Trevino Brings Plenty and Eva Joy. Leah has two daughters, and her poetry addresses family, love, identity, and her experience as a Native American adoptee and second-generation immigrant. She currently works at the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation and is a board member of Advancing Gender Equity in the Arts.

Alise Sanchez is a member of the Little Shell Band of Ojibwe, raised on the cold, clear nights of western Montana, and transplanted to the Pacific NW to flourish. She is a community-centered social services provider, currently serving as the director of the Multnomah County Domestic and Sexual Violence Coordination Office. She makes her home in queer and indigenous community, is a proud parent to two children, and is finally starting to self-identify as a writer.

Jessica Mehta and Gary Lark will read selections of their new works published by Airlie Press.

This series brings award-winning Oregon writers to the center to read, followed by a discussion and open mic. Margaret Chula will offer a free haiku workshop from 6:00, followed by a reading.

Margaret Chula has published ten collections of poetry including, most recently, Shadow Man. Her haiku collection, Grinding my ink, received the Haiku Society of America Book Award. Grants from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Regional Arts and Culture Council have supported her work as well as fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and Playa at Summer Lake. and She has been a featured speaker and workshop leader at writers’ conferences throughout the United States, as well as in Poland, Canada, Peru, and Japan. Maggie has also served as president of the Tanka Society of America and as Poet Laureate for Friends of Chamber Music. Living in Kyoto for twelve years, she now makes her home in Portland, Oregon, where she hikes, swims, and enjoys wildlife in her back yard.

Portland author Floyd Skloot joins us at 7 pm on Thursday, October 17th to read from his new collection of poems, Far West, published by Louisiana State University Press.

Skloot’s Far West intertwines the past and present, as time alternates between racing and standing still. Crafting poems that confront memory lapses and painful recollections, Skloot traces his moments of purest perception and expression: his wife practicing music, his daughter finding delight in the presence of wildlife, Vladimir Nabokov able to lose himself when playing goalie in a soccer match. A poem about a forgotten word or name can lead to one about a song that refuses to stop playing over and over in our minds, or to an evocation of a long-dead futuristic novelist who comes back from the afterlife to find a world even stranger than any he imagined. In poems that range from traditional forms and short lyrics to longer narratives and free verse, Skloot explores how emotional experiences—memory and forgetting, love and loss, reverie and urgent attention—all come together in our search for coherence and authentic self-expression.

Floyd Skloot is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, and novelist whose work has won three Pushcart Prizes, a PEN USA Literary Award, two Pacific NW Book Awards, and two Oregon Book Awards. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, and many of the leading journals in this country as well as overseas. He has contributed book reviews to The New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Sewanee Review, and other publications.

Colette Tennant just completed a book titled Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale: a Brief Guide, forthcoming in September 2019. Billy Collins recently awarded her poem 3rd place in the 2019 Fish Publishing Contest in Ireland. She has two books of poetry: Commotion of Wings (2010) and Eden and After (2015). Her poems have been published in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and others. She has been an English professor for 24 years, including teaching creative writing. She enjoys inspiring people to write poems.

Featured reader begins at 7:00 and the open mic will directly follow. Our hosts, the Ike Box, feature a wide variety of beverages and snack options! The Ike Box is located at 229 Cottage St NE in Salem, at the intersection of Chemeketa and Cottage. http://www.ikebox.com/

Tom Hogan’s new book, Giving Thanks: New and Selected Poems was published by Dancing Moon Press in 2018. He is the author of five chapbooks and The Promise of the Trail (also by Dancing Moon Press, 2014). He directs the Milwaukie Poetry Series, currently in its 13th Season and lives with his wife Jane in Milwaukie, Oregon.

Featured reader begins at 7:00 and the open mic will directly follow. Our hosts, the Ike Box, feature a wide variety of beverages and snack options! The Ike Box is located at 229 Cottage St NE in Salem, at the intersection of Chemeketa and Cottage. http://www.ikebox.com/

Susan Morse moved to the Willamette Valley in 2016 and is currently a member of the Oregon Poetry Association, as well as Mid Valley Poetry Society. She also frequently participates in readings at the Salem Poetry Project. In the Hush is her first chapbook, but individual poems have appeared in various journals such as Cream City Review, The Mom Egg, The Aurorean, Sixfold, and most recently The Willawaw Journal.

Susan’s featured reading of poems from her chapbook In the Hush begins at 7:00 p.m. at the Salem Book Bin, 450 Court Street NE, Salem (503-361-1235) and will be followed by an Open Mic.

Head for the Hills is an Open Mic Event. Wednesday, October 30. 6pm-7:45 pm. Read 3 poems or read for 5 minutes. Light refreshments. Sign up sheet available at 5:45. Late comers welcome.

Open Mic bringing student writers together with community writers. Poetry, fiction and other genres. Sign ups begin at 7:00.