Evergreen to Host Womxn’s Poetry Reading Wednesday, Oct. 9

The Evergreen State College will host a poetry reading on campus on Wednesday, Oct. 9. 

Not a Luxury: Raucous Poetry by Womxn Faculty, featuring Dawn Píchon Barron, Tara Hardy, Catalina Ocampo, Suzanne Simons and Sandra Yannone, will take place 7-9 pm at Purce Hall 1. 

The title is inspired by Audre Lourde’s essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. The event celebrates recent publications and writings by Evergreen new and long-time womxn faculty, representing a range of raucous perspectives on gender, queer, Indigenous, Latinx, disability justice, and other issues central to our dreams, survival, and visions of change.  

The event features:

Dawn Píchon Barron is a mixed-blood writer and educator whose poetry appears in many reviews and anthologies, and in her debut collection Escape Girl Blues.  Dawn is Director/Faculty of the Native Pathways Program at Evergreen where she lives at the southern tip of the Salish Sea.  

Tara Hardy is a working class, Queer, Femme, chronically ill writer, and founder of Bent, a writing institute for LGBTQ people in Seattle. Her most recent book of poems, My, My, My, My, My, won a 2017 Washington State Book Award, and explores the links between childhood trauma and chronic illness.   

Catalina Ocampo was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and came to the United States at age 18. She writes in both English and Spanish, and is currently completing her MFA in poetry writing through the Queens University of Charlotte Latin America program. 

Suzanne Simons is a journalist-turned-poet whose work has appeared at the Josephy Cultural Center in Oregon, in stone at Olympia’s downtown skate park, and in Passager, Western Friend, and Aethlon: The Journal of Sports and Literature. She also helped establish the city of Olympia’s poet laureate position.

Sandra Yannone grew up near the edge of the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island Sound, where she developed a fascination with the Titanic disaster of 1912.  Her debut collection Boats for Women (Salmon Poetry 2019) navigates the cartographies of silence, disaster, desire and hope.  Sandy is Director of Evergreen’s Writing Center.

The reading will be followed by a book signing. It is free and open to the public.