Celebrate National Poetry Month in April with haiku!

Submit up to two haiku by March 31st at info@plumbainbridge.com and win a chance for Plum Gift Certificates.

Entries will be judged by a member of Haiku Northwest and all haiku will be displayed on the lights over the Plum deck in Winslow.

Suquamish poet Cedar Sigo presents a selection of his works, riffing off the visual artworks featured in our Indigenous Strength & Wellness exhibition. Cedar’s readings promise to expand and enhance interpretations of selected artworks and add another dimension to the exhibition’s experience of engagement.

Poetry is not the books in the library. Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book.
– Jorge Luis Borges

It could be said that poetry is best felt with the sun on the skin, or the wind on the cheek, or discovered in the wild. Indeed, this experience of poetry will be available to Bainbridge Island this April in celebration of National Poetry Month.

Poetry Corners, a local poetry movement first established by an enthusiastic group of local creatives in 1999, continues its long-running tradition of posting local poems throughout the windows of downtown Bainbridge Island.

Beginning in April, Poetry Corners will present its annual poetry exhibition featuring the jury-selected poetry of local poets.

The public poetry exhibit will be displayed from April 1st through April 30th in celebration of National Poetry Month, which was created by the American Academy of Poets. “The Academy of American Poets established National Poetry Month in 1996. Along the way we enlisted a variety of government agencies and officials, educational leaders, publishers, sponsors, poets, and arts organizations to help. National Poetry Month is a registered trademark of the Academy of American Poets.

“The goals of National Poetry Month are to:
- highlight the extraordinary legacy and ongoing achievement of American poets
- encourage the reading of poems
- assist teachers in bringing poetry into their classrooms
- increase the attention paid to poetry by national and local media
- encourage increased publication and distribution of poetry books, and
- encourage support for poets and poetry.

Why was April chosen for National Poetry Month?
In coordination with poets, booksellers, librarians, and teachers, we chose a month when poetry could be celebrated with the highest level of participation.” (https://poets.org/national-poetry-month/faq)

Poetry Corners is being published by local publisher, Bainbridge Island Press, founded by Tamarah Rockwood who has long enjoyed editing and printing indie-poetry journals. “I have always known that more people write poetry than they let on,” Rockwood noted. “It is such a joy finding these poets and reading their work, and immortalizing their craft in a journal. This is the purpose of art, is to bring the artists together.”

There will be a live reading on TBD at 6 p.m. at the Bainbridge Island Library. Chapbooks will be available to buy at Eagle Harbor Bookstore and other participating bookstores.

Poems will be displayed in Winslow business windows.

A map of the poems’ locations can be found here.

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Contact
Bainbridge Island press
Tamarah Rockwood
Poetry Corners Editor

poetrycorners2022@gmail.com

In celebration of her solo exhibition in the Sherry Grover Gallery, BIMA is delighted to welcome artist’s book creator and master printmaker Karen Kunc for a talk about her practice, followed by conversation and a light reception.

Karen Kunc explores inventive color abstractions of the natural and human-fashioned world in her prints and artist books, creating ideas of ‘strange beauty’. Kunc was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She received her BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1975, and her MFA from Ohio State University in 1977. She is the Cather Professor of Art at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln where she has taught since 1983. Her awards include: Fulbright Scholar Awards to Finland and Bangladesh; two National Endowment for the Arts awards; the 2007 SGCI Printmaker Emeritus Award; a Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Master Award; an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship; the 2016 Lincoln Mayor’s Art Award; the 2000 Governor’s Art Award. Recent prizes for her work include: the Miniature Print Exhibition X, Vancouver, Canada; the Yerevan Print Biennial, Armenia; the Novosibirsk Print Triennial, Russia; Hida Woodcut Triennial, Takayama, Japan. She has exhibited her color woodcut prints and artist books extensively nationally and internationally, recent invitational venues include: Paris, France; Tokyo, Japan; Maui, Hawaii; New York, NY; Venice, Italy; Santander, Spain; Krakow, Poland.; Austin, Texas. Her work is in public collections including: the Museum of Modern Art; the Library of Congress; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Sheldon Museum of Art; Joslyn Art Museum; American Art Museum Smithsonian; Haas Arts Library Yale University; Stanford University; Jyväskylä Art Museum, Finland; Spencer Library University of Kansas; Portland (OR) Art Museum; Herbert E. Johnson Museum of Art Cornell University. She has taught workshops in Egypt, Italy, Finland, Poland, Japan, France, Mexico, Iceland, Spain; and she has lectured as a visiting artist to over 200 institutions. In 2014 she opened Constellation Studios as a creative work-site for print, paper, and book, inviting artists for residencies, workshops, collaborations, exhibitions.

Bloedel Reserve Creative Resident Jori Lewis will be speaking about and reading from her book, Slaves for Peanuts.

Thursday, April 13, 6:30 PM
Bainbridge Island Public Library, BI WA

This free event is in collaboration with Bainbridge Public Library and Eagle Harbor Books.

Jori Lewis writes narrative nonfiction about the environment and agriculture, mostly in the Global South. Her reports and essays explore how people interact with their environments, focusing on the intersections between nature, history, and culture. Her writing has been published in The Atlantic Magazine, Discover Magazine and Emergence Magazine, among others, and she is a senior editor of Adi Magazine, a literary magazine of global politics. In 2022, she published her first book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History, which was supported by the prestigious Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant and a Silvers Grant for Work in Progress.

Jori holds a MJ from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a MA in the social sciences and a BA in anthropology, both from the University of Chicago. She splits her time between Illinois and Senegal.