Featured Poetry Reading with Open Mic

Celebrate National Poetry Month! Tompkins County poet and goat herder Wren Tuatha reads from her collection Thistle and Brilliant, (shortlisted for the New Women’s Voices prize) and upcoming works. Followed by a brief open mic featuring local poets!

Thistle and Brilliant, written while Wren lived at Heathcote, a rural Intentional Community and sustainability demonstration site, calls on imagery of stream and woods to portrait complicated human relationships. Not love poems, but rather snapshots of relationships in motion, Thistle and Brilliant contains stunning metaphors and imperfect characters. 

Praise for Thistle and Brilliant:
Wren Tuatha’s poems are lively, rich in images and bold unexpected language. She writes especially well about love unrequited and satisfying. –Marge Piercy

Wren Tuatha’s poetry has won the Young Authors Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and shortlisted for the Mary Blinn Poetry Prize and the Disquiet Literary Prize. She earned her MFA at Goddard College. Her first collection is Thistle and Brilliant (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry has appeared in journals including The Baltimore Review, Silk Road, Pirene’s Fountain, Sierra Nevada Review, The Lake, Bangalore Review, Lavender Review, and anthologies, including California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology and When Home Is Not Safe, Writings on Domestic, Verbal, Emotional, and Physical Abuse. She's founding editor at Califragile, a journal of climate change and social justice. Wren was formerly Artist-in-Residence at Heathcote Center in Maryland, where she founded the Heathcote Open Classroom program. She received grants from Towson University’s Women’s Center and Office of Diversity to perform her slam play, This Is How She Steps on Snakes, and other productions. Wren and partner author/activist C.T. Butler herd rescue goats among the forested hills of West Danby.