Author Next Door: Karen Sagstetter, Kathleen O’Toole, and Terence Winch
Date and Time
Apr 17, 2019 6:30 pm
Location
Takoma
235 Carroll St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20012
Apr 17, 2019 6:30 pm
Takoma
Karen Sagstetter grew up in Texas and has published poetry and fiction in numerous literary journals, includingPoet Lore,Shenandoah, andDistrict Lines; two chapbooks of poetry; two nonfiction books; andThe Thing with Willie, linked stories, set largely in Galveston. She studied in Japan as a Fulbright journalist and, with her husband, has traveled in more than fifty countries. She was head of publications at the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries; editor of the series,Asian Art and Culture; and a senior editor at the National Gallery of Art. She lives in Maryland.
COMMOTION has great heart and eloquence, as it shows us moments of the sheer intensity of living, whether in joy and love or in sorrow and in anxiety about our world. Karen Sagstetter writes about fragility–of relationships, of the planet, of our ways of life–and our world needs every witness it can get, to celebrate its beauty and to decry its woes as she does. She has seen more of the world than most of us, and she captures its “beautiful extra hours of light” as well as its ashes, its mercies and mercilessness, and its demeanor when it “flinches at the scent of human, of evil.” Let us believe–to adapt one of her lines–that she has “made it to the world’s bedside in time” and that her words will help us all sustain what we can of its recovery. She has the courage of a faithful guide.
Kathleen O’Toole has combined an active professional life in community organizing with teaching and writing. Her books include Meanwhile, (2011) and 2 chapbooks, Practice (2005), and Waking Hours (2017) along with In the Margins, which she co-authored with 3 women poets with whom she has shared her writing journey for over twenty years. Her poetry has appeared widely in magazines and journals including America, Atlanta Review, Beltway, Christian Century, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner and Potomac Review. Find her at www.kathleenotoolepoetry.com . She lives in Takoma Park, MD where she is currently serving a two-year term as Poet Laureate.
Kathleen O'Toole's MEANWHILE speaks of; "the one unmistakable/ rendering of my name,"; and her book is full of such unmistakable renderings: the rich precision of her tightly-sculpted lines make her words, and the experiences they evoke, indelible.
Terence Winch, originally from New York City, now lives in the Washington, DC, area. In the early '70s, he was one of DC's "Mass Transit" poets and was closely associated with the New York writers connected with the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in lower Manhattan. Winch, the son of Irish immigrants, has also been part of Irish-American cultural life, both as musician and writer. Some of his poetry and other writing takes its subject matter from his upbringing in a Bronx immigrant neighborhood.
February 2018 marks the publication of Terence Winch's latest book of poems, THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, brought out by Hanging Loose Press. "The Known Universe is my new favorite book of poems and should be everyone's. The poems are so brilliantly original they defy labels or comparisons. No one writes poetry like Winch. His distinct voice and artistry let him lament the losses he's experienced while laughing at the ways he does it, or share the joy of life's pleasures while cataloging their disappearance. The author's unique perspective is expressed through litanies, prayers, anti-prayers, traditional forms, untraditional forms, skepticism, jokes, declamations, soulful pleas, love notes, philosophical theories and inquiries, word play, rhyme, near rhyme, off rhyme, no rhyme, meter, anti-meter, confession and deflection, and all with singular intellectual power and insight into life's challenges and rewards." ---Michael Lally
