For
Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com
David Lee
and Gailmarie Pahmeier to read at City Art
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday October 8th, 7:00—9:00 P.M.
Utah’s
first Poet Laureate David Lee and Nevada poet Gailmarie Pahmeier will
read from their works on Wednesday, October
8th at 7:00 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Public Library as part of the City Art
Reading Series and the Utah Humanities Council Book Festival. This event is
free and open to the public.
David Lee: Born
in west Texas, David Lee is the author of numerous poetry collections,
including The Porcine Legacy (1974), Driving and Drinking (1979), The Porcine Canticles (1984), Wayburne Pig (1997), News
from Down to the Café: New Poems (1999), and A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems (1999). Lee has
been a boxer, pig farmer, seminary student, cotton mill worker, and the only
white baseball player for a Negro League team. He received a PhD in literature,
with a concentration in the poetry of John Milton, from the University of Utah.
Lee explores the interaction of humans and the natural world in his poetry,
depicting rural landscapes and lives and often employing a rural American
dialect. His collection So Quietly the Earth (2004)
portrays the lands of the American Southwest.
David Lee has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
National Endowment for the Humanities. He won the Mountains & Plains
Booksellers Award in Poetry and the Western States Book Award in Poetry. The first
poet laureate of Utah, Lee received the Utah Governor’s Award for lifetime
achievement in the arts. He taught for many years at Southern Utah State
University.
Gailmarie Pahmeier has been a Nevadan for nearly 30
years. She currently teaches creative writing and contemporary literature
courses at the University of Nevada, where she has been honored with the Alan
Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award.
Her work has been
widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including Booth,
Passager, Interim, Mudfish, New Poets of the AmericanWest (for which she
won the Editor’s Choice Award), Literary Nevada, and the Autumn House
Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. She is the author of the poetry
collection The House on Breakaheart Road and two chapbooks from Black
Rock Press. Her most recent chapbook, Shake It and It Snows, won the
2009 Coal Hill Chapbook Award; poems from this collection were nominated for
Pushcart Prizes. Her literary awards include a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship
and two Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council. In 2007, she received
the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
City Art is Salt Lake’s longest-running
reading series and provides a unique forum for the literary arts during their
weekly programs on each of the first three Wednesdays of the month from
September to May at the Salt Lake City Public Library.
City Art is sponsored by the Utah
Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake
City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund. This reading is also sponsored by the Utah
Humanities Council as part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival.
Joel Long