The Two Judiths Return to Broadway!

Tonight at 7 we bring back An Evening with the Two Judiths, featuring local authors Judith Arcana and Judith Barrington. It is sure to be a lively event; we hope you can join us.

Born and raised in the Great Lakes region and now living in Portland, Judith Arcana is a writer of poems, stories, essays, and books and a longtime scholar, teacher, and activist. Her work is published in many journals, online, and on paper. Judith A's latest collections are a poetry chapbook (4th Period English), a signed/numbered edition five-poem broadside (POEMS) and a chapbook manuscript in an envelope (Family Business). These three comprise the Ash Creek Series. Her most recent full-length book is What if your mother, a collection of poems and monologues examining a constellation of motherhood themes rarely offered with such richness, including abortion, adoption, miscarriage, and the contemporary biotechnology of childbirth. Judith A is also the author of Grace Paley's Life Stories, a Literary Biography. She is a Jane -- a member of the Chicago underground service that helped more than eleven thousand women and girls get safe illegal abortions before the US Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade in 1973. In 1972, she was one of seven Janes arrested by the Chicago police.

Judith A has a PhD in Literature, an MA in Women's Studies, an Urban Preceptorship in Preventive Medicine, and a BA in English. She’s taught in high schools, colleges, libraries, living rooms and many other other places. Recently she's completed a fiction manuscript and a big bucket of new poems.

Judith Barrington was born in Brighton, England, and moved to the United States in 1976. Although she has made her home in Portland since then, she now spends time each year in Europe doing readings and workshops.

She is the author of three poetry collections (Horses and the Human Soul, History and Geography, and Trying to be an Honest Woman), two chapbooks (Postcard from the Bottom of the Sea and Lost Lands), a prizewinning memoir (Lifesaving: A Memoir ), and a text on writing literary memoir Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art), which is used in numerous writing programs. She has also recorded a CD of selected poems titled Harvest.

Judith B is on the faculty of the Universtiy of Alaska's MFA program. Over the past twenty five years she has taught creative writing at various universities and at many summer writing workshops including the Port Townsend Writers' Conference at Centrum, Haystack, Split Rock, Fishtrap, the Ashland Writing Conference, the Hassayampa Writers' Conference in Prescott, Arizona, and Flight of the Mind, which she co-founded.

The two Judiths can always be counted on to put on a good show -- lots of lively discussion, good poetry, and interesting segues. To get a flavor of the event, here's a transcript of an email conversation between the two Judiths. We hope you can join us tonight at 7!