Stella Beratlis and Christina Hutchins

8 OCTOBER 2015 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a book launch for Christina Hutchins's Tender the Maker, with a reading by Stella Beratlis, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Stella Beratlis's debut book of poems is Alkali Sink. Lee Herrick says, "Stella Beratlis writes unforgettable poems that stir inside you long after you've finished reading them. Alkali Sink is simultaneously domestic and wild, urban and rural, full of surprises and wisdom." She's widely published in literary journals, including Quercus, California Quarterly, Penumbra, and elsewhere, and she's anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, whose title comes from one of her poems. She's also co-editor of More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets.
Christina Hutchins's new book of poems, to be launched at this event, is Tender the Maker, winner of the May Swenson Award. Cynthia Hogue, judge for the award, says, "Again and again in Christina Hutchin's Tender the Maker, poems startle us into awareness of the overlooked, the nearly always invisible…and the marvelous, those aspects of life that come under the rubric of 'mystery,' in all senses of the word. Hutchins combines a pitch-perfect and precise lyricism with a postmodern sensibility of language's materiality." Previous collections include The Stranger Dissolves, a Lambda Award finalist, and Collecting Light. The first Poet Laureate of the City of Albany, California, she counts among her honors two Barbara Deming Awards, a James Phelan Award, and a fellowship to Summer Literary Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia, where some of the poems in this new book originated.