Judy Grahn

Cheryl Dumesnil and Judy Grahn

17 FEBRUARY 2013 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Cheryl Dumesnil and Judy Grahn, wheelchair accessible, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

More about the readers
Cheryl Dumesnil's new book is a memoir, Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood. Steve Fellner says, "Imagine combining Emily Dickinson's grace with Rosie the Riveter's know-how and Annie Hall's neurosis with Billy Jean King's determination. Then put a quest for a baby in the mix. You might come up with something like Cheryl Dumesnil's new memoir on lesbian motherhood." Her book takes us through the madcap maze of the (il)legality of lesbian marriage, fertility treatments, multiple miscarriages, neurosis, and spiritual practice to the ultimate blessed arrival of a son. She is author of the book of poems In Praise of Falling, which won the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Judy Grahn's new memoir is A Simple Revolution, a dramatic narrative of her working class roots, her army career and discharge for being lesbian, her education as one of the first whites to attend Howard University, and her life as a celebrated poet in the Bay Area during the tumultuous beginnings of the lesbian movement in the late 1960s. Her recent books include love belongs to those who do the feeling and The Judy Grahn Reader, among many other collections. Her honors include an American Book Award for Queen of Wands, a Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award from The Publishing Triangle, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Lambda Literary Award.