BIMA: Spring into Words

On the eve of National Poetry Month, come celebrate the joy of words with three award-winning poets who are launching new books onto the national literary scene. Geffrey Davis, Keetje Kuipers, and Erika Meitner will read poems from their newest collections, touching on topics as diverse as parenthood, fly fishing, and the complicated love for one’s home place. Expressing gratitude with grace, and mixing sorrow with fierce joy, these three fearless voices are a powerful reminder of what words can still do. This event is part of the annual Momentum Festival at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art.

Erika Meitner is the author of Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003); Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011); Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; and Copia (BOA Editions, 2014). Her fifth book of poems, Holy Moly Carry Me, was published by BOA Editions in September of 2018. Meitner’s poems have been anthologized widely, and have appeared in publications including Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Tin House. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Blue Mountain Center, and she was the 2015 US-UK Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently an associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Night Angler (BOA Editions), winner of the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Revising the Storm ​(BOA Editions), winner of the 2013 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. He also coauthored the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016) with LA-based poet F. Douglas Brown. Named a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Davis has received the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, and the Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as fellowships from Bread Loaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Whiting Foundation. His words have appeared in Crazyhorse​, ​Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, ​New York Times Magazine,The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis lives with his family in Fayetteville, AR. He teaches at the University of Arkansas and with The Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran’s low-residency MFA program. Davis also serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.