In celebration of National Poetry Month, Tacoma Poet Laureate Josie Emmons Turner hosts a special reading Sunday, April 15 at 3:00 p.m. at the Museum of Glass featuring Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, with poets Rick Barot, and Michael Schmeltzer.

Kathleen Flenniken is the 2012 -2014 Washington State Poet Laureate.  Her new collection Plume is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site.  Her first book Famous won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association.  Flenniken’s awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust.

Rick Barot’s recent poem “The Wooden Overcoat” is included in the April 2012 edition of Poetry.  He has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books:  The Darker Fall and Want which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize.  Barot was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University and Warren Wilson College.

Michael Schmeltzer’s poems have earned many honors including four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award.  He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water-Stone Review, the New York Quarterly and many others.

Josie Emmons Turner is the 2011 – 2013 Tacoma Poet Laureate, an honor sponsored by the Tacoma Arts Commission through a competitive process.  She earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and has been published in California Quarterly, Backstreet Review, the Floating Bridge Review, and the anthology In Tahoma’s Shadow.  Her broadside Pagoda was recently published by Springtide Press.  She has been an artist in resident at Centrum and teaches writing and literature at Clover Park High School.

Admission to the reading is free and is sponsored in partnership with the Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Arts Commission.