Thurs. Sept. 10, 2009 #241

Sarah Vap, Todd Fredson, Susan Rich + Jeff Encke on The Writer's Craft

Jeff Encke taught writing and criticism at Columbia University for several years, serving as writer-in-residence for the Program in Narrative Medicine while completing his PhD in English in 2002. He now teaches literature at Richard Hugo House. His poems have appeared in or forthcoming from American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Bat City Review, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, Salt Hill, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. In 2004, he published Most Wanted: A Gamble in Verse, a series of love poems addressed to Saddam Hussein and other Iraqi war criminals printed on a deck of playing cards. Jeff will be reading from his essay Unwinding the Given: On Linda Bierds originally published in Octopus magazine.

Sarah Vap is the author of Dummy Fire, which won the 2006 Saturnalia Poetry Prize, and American Spikenard, which won the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize. She is co-editor of poetry for the online journal 42 Opus, and lives with her husband and their two sons on the Olympic Peninsula. Her next book, Faulkner’s Rosary, is forthcoming from Saturnalia Books in 2010.

Todd Fredson's poems have appeared in Poetry International, Blackbird, Court Green, 42 Opus, Gulf Coast, First Intensity, Pistola, Puerto del Sol, RUNES, Slush Pile and other journals. He has received several awards in support of his work. He received his Masters in Fine Arts from Arizona State University in 2007. He is the director of programming at the McReavy House Museum of Hood Canal and a writer for Read Right Systems in Shelton, WA. Todd lives in the Skokomish Valley, with his wife, Sarah Vap, and their two sons.

Susan Rich is the author of three collections of poetry, The Cartographer’s Tongue / Poems of the World, Cures Include Travel, and The Alchemist’s Kitchen. She has received awards from PEN USA, The Times (of London) Literary Supplement, and Peace Corps Writers. Recent poems have appeared in the Antioch Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry Ireland Review. Susan Rich grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts and now makes her home in Seattle.