Biespiel and Kuipers to Read Friday, April 24

Two poets, one established and the other at the beginning of a promising career, will read together at Broadway Books on Friday, April 24th, at 7 pm. David Biespiel and Keetje Kuipers have much in common. Both have had books published by BOA Editions, one of the most distinguished poetry publishers in the country, and both have been Wallace Stegner Fellows at Stanford University. Both of them also have recently published books, and we are happy to have them together in the store reading from their new works.

David Biespiel is a poet, editor, writer, and founding executive director of the Attic Writers' Workshop in Portland, an independent literary studio that has provided workshops and individualized consultation to more than 300 writers annually since 1999. Born in Tulsa, raised in Houston, and educated at Stanford, the University of Maryland, and Boston University, David moved to Portland in 1995.

Since 2003 he has been the poetry columnist for The Oregonian, which has the longest-running column on poetry in the United States. In 2005 he was named editor of Poetry Northwest, serving in that capacity until 2010 and reviving a magzine that had ceased publication in 2002. In 2010 he was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

He currently divides his teaching time among the MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, Oregon State University, and Wake Forest University, where he will serve as poet-in-residence in the fall. His newest collection of poems is The Book of Men and Women, published by the University of Washington Press. David has written three other collections of poetry and edited two anthologies, including Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, published in 2006 and winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

Since 2008, he as been a frequent contributor to Politico's "Arena," a cross-party, cross-discipline daily conversation about politics and policy among more than a hundred current and former members of Congress, governors, mayors, political strategists and scholars.


In an interview about The Attic, David talked about what's involved in teaching creative writing: "Other times, it's asking you to give more: write more deeply, think more clearly, feel more passionately about your experiences and how you transform those into your writing. I mean: Write as if you have just this one chance to Say the Thing. That's what it means to "find your voice"....In other words, we teach an attitude about caring for the art of language as it exists in your writing. He goes on to recommend that writers read, read, and then read some more: "Immerse yourself in reading the kind of writing you're doing. Writing screenplays? Read them and watch movies. Constantly. Writing a memoir?  Read them. Writing poems? Read them -- and not just the latest National Book Award finalists or whatever is fadish."

Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her BA at Swarthmore College and her MFA at the University of Oregon. She is now a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.


In 2007 Keetje was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident in Oregon's Rogue River valley. She used the residency to complete work on her new book Beautiful in the Mouth, published by BOA Editions and awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.
In addition, Keetje has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone, as well as awards from Atlanta Review and Nimrod. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others, and have been nominated four years in a row for the Pushcart Prize.
 
Beautiful in the Mouth tackles what happens when the things we care for -- children, lovers, parents, dreams, homes -- are taken away? What populates our landscapes and how do we perceive those objects? Written over the course of five years and a geographic journey spanning Paris to New York to Montana to Oregon, Keetje's debut collection of poems examines contemporary female loss in terms of literal and figurative geography: the empty bedroom of a dead child, a clear-cut hillside outside of a logging town. She continues in the spirit of poets like Elizabeth Bishop to examine how loss forces itself upon unwilling landscapes and how those landscapes must alter to receive that loss. Keetje divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula, Montana, with her dog Bishop.
 
We hope you can join us for this wonderful evening of poetry and discussion. And don't forget that our annual April Poetry Sale is still in session -- buy one book of poetry and you can buy a second  of equal or lesser cost for half price! And you can do this over and over until your poetry shelves groan with satisfaction.