Fiction writer Gerda Saunders and Poet Shira Dentz will read from their works on April 18th at 7:00 P.M. at the Salt Lake Public Library’s main branch as part of the City Art Reading Series. Shira Dentz's poems and stories have appeared in journals including American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Field, Western Humanities Review, Seneca Review, Chelsea, Aufgabe, LIT, Electronic Poetry Review, Laurel Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, How2, Barrow Street, The Journal, Diner, Tarpaulin Sky, Pinstripe Fedora, Diagram, Luna°, Can we have our ball back?, Web del Sol, Gargoyle, Phoebe, St. Mark’s Poetry Project Newsletter, Big Bridge, Outsider Ink, So to Speak, Black Zinnia, and Cimarron Review. and on the Poetry Daily website. Her poetry has aired on NPR, and she has been the recipient of Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review's Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly's Poetry Prize. In addition, she has received fellowships from from Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, Squaw Valley Writers’ Community, and the MacDowell Arts Colony. She lived and worked for many years as a graphic artist in New York City, is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently is a doctoral candidate at the University of Utah. Gerda Saunders is currently the Associate Director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Utah and now and then teaches creative writing for the English Department. She is the author of the short story collection Blessings on the Sheepdog (SMU Press, 2002), which tells the stories of characters who grew up in apartheid South Africa. She is currently working on two novels: she is revising The Last Pietà of MichelAgniolo, which received the Utah Arts Council Publication Prize in 2000. The story focuses on Maddaluzza, a contemporary of the great Renaissance artist Michelangelo, who tries to forge a life as an artist in spite of the fact that no such life was available to a woman in the sixteenth century. Maddaluzza gives an account of the making of Michelangelo’s last sculpture, now known as the Rondanini Pietà. The piece consists of Mary, in a standing position, holding upright the body of the dead Christ. Several weeks before Michelangelo was to die, he made a major change: he cut off the Christ’s head and fashioned a new head and shoulders out of the marble that remained between the two figures. In 1974, the art historian Bruno Mantura found the original head built into a monastery wall in Rome’s Trastevere district. Maddaluzza tells how it came to be carried there after the artist’s death. Gerda’s other novel in progress is titled People of the Mouth, and tells the story of the last known Bushman painter, !Kerre, who, in 1850, was killed by a white farmer who mistook his paint horn for a hunter’s quiver. Fearing revenge, the farmer dumped !Kerre’s body in an ash pit, thereby dooming the painter to an afterlife on the moon rather than be reunited with his relatives in the Hole in the Sky—according to Bushman mythology, only those who were properly buried have access to the Hole in the Sky. On the moon !Kerre lives as a hunter-gatherer, much as he did on earth. Together with similarly dishonored Bushmen who share his fate, he tries to influence events on earth in order to get a proper burial for his own remains and those of his new acquaintances, who include Sarah Baartman and Bukha. Sarah Baartman was exhibited in Europe during the early nineteenth century as the Hottentot Venus; after she died when only in her twenties, her body was dissected by the famous anatomist George Cuvier and her genitalia displayed in the Museum of Man in Paris. !Kerre’s other close moon companion, Bukha, The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations. The featured reading will be followed by an open reading. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com