Award-Winning Poets to Read Tonight

Please join us tonight at 7 pm to hear two terrific Oregon poets -- and Oregon Book Award winners -- read from their latest works. Reading tonight are Penelope Scambly Schott and Henry Hughes.

Penelope has worked as a donut maker in a cider mill, a home health aide, and an artist's model. For several years she was an English professor at Rutgers University and Raritan Valley Community College, until moving to Oregon, where she teaches poetry workshops, writes, paints, hikes, and grades papers. Penelope won the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Poetry for her book A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, published by Turning Point. She has received many awards and fellowships throughout her career, two of the most recent being the 2009 Ronald Wardall Prize, which resulted in the publication of the chapbook Under Taos Mountain, The Terrible Quagmire of Magpie and Tia, by Rain Mountain Press, and the 2009 Sarah Lantz Poetry Book Prize, by Calyx Press, which will result in the October publication of Crow Mercies. Penelope also participates in The Cool Women Poets group of New Jersey, a themed poetry performance group that has produced four anthologies and, most recently, a CD entitled "Cool Women Collect Themselves."

Tonight Penelope will read from Under Taos Mountain and Six Lips, her newest collection (Mayapple Press). Colette Inez says the writing in Six Lips is "insightful, sure footed, possessed of an unerring ear for the music of language," going on to say "This is the work of a poet writing in full stride. Praise be."

Henry Hughes, an associate professor of English at Western Oregon University, won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for his first book, Men Holding Eggs (Mammoth Books), which was praised by poet Li-Young Lee for its gorgeous, masterful writing. Henry grew up on Long Island, received his PhD in English from Purdue, and moved to Oregon in 2002. Before teaching at WOU, he also taught at Hofstra University and the Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Besides his writing, teaching, and literary criticism, Henry is an avid traveler and fisherman, and he has his open water SCUBA certification. Tonight Henry will read from his recently published collection Moist Meridian, published by Mammoth Books.