Submitted
The 40th Salina Spring Poetry Series, sponsored and organized by Salina Arts & Humanities, continues on Tuesday, April 16, with a reading by Laura Lee Washburn.
The reading will begin at 7 p.m. at Red Fern Booksellers, 106 S Santa Fe Ave. Admission will be $5 cash at the door and free for students with ID.
Traci Brimhall, Kansas Poet Laureate, curated this year’s series. Brimhall selected poets with a broad range of perspectives who will share their work in Salina this month.
“Laura Lee Washburn is one of the most dedicated advocates for poetry in Kansas. When I was at an artist residency in Arkansas, someone asked me if I knew Laura Lee Washburn because her class at Pittsburg State was the reason they were a writer," said Brimhall. "That's the kind of passion for language she inspires. Her work always courts the mysterious and the complicated nature of beauty. She spends a great deal of her time advocating for the arts, her students, and her community, and I'm so grateful that she could make the time to come be a part of the series this year."
Laura Lee Washburn is a University Professor, the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, the author of The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark)
Washburn was awarded the Nelson Book Award from the Kansas Authors Club, This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize), and the Editor-in-Chief of Poetry Cooperative/Heartland: Poetry of Love, Resistance, and Solidarity
Her book "Arteries" is coming this May. Harbor Review’s "Washburn Prize is named in her honor.