Molly Fisk

Molly Fisk and Francesca Bell

17 MAY 2026 — sunday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Molly Fisk, Walking Wheel, a novel-in-verse, and poet and translator Francesca Bell, What Small Sound, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


The featured books will be available at the reading and on bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Francesca Bell's most recent poetry collections are What Small Sound, a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2023, and Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Joshua Mensch says, "Bell is a fearless poet in the truest sense of the word." She is also a literary translator and serves as the current Marin County Poet Laureate, (2023-2025). Her translation work includes Max Sessner's Whoever Drowned Here, and her poems and translations have appeared in journals including Rattle, North American Review, New Ohio Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Francesca Bell received the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle and honors in the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. She lives in Novato, California, where she works with community arts programming and literary organizations.

Molly Fisk is a poet, essayist, and radio commentator whose new novel-in-verse, Walking Wheel, presents a sequence of linked poems that follow a newly married couple's first year of building a life together in the American West of 1875, exploring intimacy, work, and resilience through historical voices. Molly Gloss says, "Molly Fisk reminds us what poetry can do, put to the service of Story." Her previous poetry books include The More Difficult Beauty and Listening to Winter, as well as multiple collections of commentary, including Everything But the Kitchen Skunk: Ongoing Observations from a Working Poet, essays. She received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship in 2019 and served as Poet Laureate of Nevada County, California, (2017-2019). Her honors include the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, Dogwood Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and California Arts Council. She lives in Nevada City, where she teaches writing and works with poets and community writers.