SpeakEasy 7 ~ Friday, July 20, 2012 ~ 7:30pm ~ The Amadeus Project
1209 Cornwall Avenue ~ Bellingham, Washington
is pleased to present Poets on Assignment ~ Variations on a Prompt
Jim Bertolino’s eleventh volume of poetry, titled Every Wound Has A Rhythm, is being published next month by World Enough Writers. His work has appeared in a wide range of literary magazines and anthologies, including Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, New Mexico Quarterly, Raven Chronicles, Clover and New Poets of the American West edited by Lowell Jaeger. His work has received national recognition through a Book-of-the-Month Club Poetry Fellowship, the Discovery Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Quarterly Review of Literature book publication awards and having two books reprinted by the Connecticut College Contemporary American Poetry Archive. Jim retired in 2006 from a 32-year career teaching creative writing and literature for colleges and universities from Cornell to Western. 2012 is the fourth year he has served as poetry judge for the American Book Award. He grew up in Wisconsin, and now lives on five Whatcom County acres with his wife Anita Boyle.
An illustrator and graphic designer, Anita K. Boyle has spent her lifetime as a dedicated denizen of the Pacific Northwest. During a Willard R. Espy Foundation literary residency in 2003, she wrote sixty poems, and still had time for small talk with a coyote. Boyle is author of the chapbook Bamboo Equals Loon (Egress Studio Press, 2001). Her poems have appeared in literary magazines, including StringTown, The Raven Chronicles, Crab Creek Review, Cranky, Indiana Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Mudlark, Margin, Mirror Northwest, and in the anthologies Red Sky Morning and Saints of Hysteria. She lives near an inspiring pond outside Bellingham, Washington, with her poet-friend-husband James Bertolino—who she has collaborated with on two chapbooks of poetry. Egress Studio is a short jog from the house, where she can be found happily doing the same new things every day.
Jennifer Bullis, originally from Reno, did time in various California educational institutions and escaped, finally, to Bellingham, where she taught at Whatcom Community College for fourteen years. Currently, she writes, hikes, and tries to keep up with her six year-old son. Her poems appear in Iron Horse Literary Review, Natural Bridge, Comstock Review, Conversations across Borders, and Floating Bridge Review, and she is assembling manuscripts for chapbooks and a full-length collection of poems. She has kind of a thing for leaves.
Dave Cole lives on a cliff at the eastern edge of the Precambrian core of the Black Hills of South Dakota. He edits books for a handful of publishers, is a sculptor, and serves on the steering committee for the South Dakota Festival of Books. “Some of What I’m About to Tell You Is True,” with voice recording, has been published in Bomb magazine’s online presence, Bomblog.
J.I. Kleinberg works and plays with words. She is co-author of the book Fat Stupid Ugly: One Woman’s Courage to Survive, is a past winner in the Sue C. Boynton Poetry Contest and blogs most days at http://chocolateisaverb.wordpress.com. Among other places, her writing has been accepted or appeared in Arcade; Anatomy & Etymology; Cirque; Drash: Northwest Mosaic; Flyways and Byways; Labyrinth; Phrasings; The Raven Chronicles; The Social Gardener; and Switched-on Gutenberg. She lives in Bellingham and doesn’t own a television.
A great believer in writing from prompts, even the most astonishing of ones, J.E. Yeasting is immensely grateful to be part of the On Assignment group, and to the illustrious Dave Cole for starting us on our word-rich journey. Although it is reported that she likes keeping a low profile, her writing has been published in various literary magazines and anthologies, and she is currently shaping several stacks of poems into new book manuscripts. She teaches writing at Western Washington University, where she has been sighted, several times a year, giving collaborative, multi-media poetry performances. When she’s not playing with words, you can often find her drawing and painting in dance studios or her art studio in Fairhaven.
Jennifer Bullis 