Please note that we have changed the venue due to plumbing repair at the Main Branch.  We will hold the reading at the Marmalade Branch instead:   Contact: City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com Great Salt Lake Celebration Reading: Nan Seymour and Joel Long at City Art Marmalade Branch, Salt Lake Public Library ] 280 West 500 North Salt Lake City, UT 84103 Wednesday February 1st, 6:30 to 8:00 P.M.               In celebration of the Great Salt Lake, Nan Seymour and Joel Long will read from their work, February 1st, at the Marmalade Branch of the Salt Lake City Public Library at 6:30 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series.    In 2015, Nan Seymour created River Writing in order to foster voice and authentic connection. Her debut poetry collection, prayers not meant for heaven, was published by Toad Hall Editions in the summer of 2021. The prayers were never meant to ascend. Instead, Nan hopes they will vine around us here on the ground, leaving us more knowingly and gladly intertwined. Throughout the 2023 Utah State legislative session, Nan served as poet-in-residence on Antelope Island, leading six week day-and-night vigil for Great Salt Lake. During the vigil, she assembled 2580 lines of poetry and praise. Her upcoming book, irreplaceable  is a collective love letter to the lake, containing over 400 individual voices from a myriad of perspectives. The size of the poem exceeds the square mile area of the lakebed and is a community cry for the lake’s restoration. Nan is preparing to lead another community vigil on the receding shoreline, beginning January 16th of 2023. She will continue to advocate for Rights of Nature, legally defensible personal rights for ecosystems, including Great Salt Lake. Her poetry gives voice to their inherent right to live, flourish, and evolve in natural way. The work emerges from Nan’s devotion to repairing the breach between humans and the beyond-human world. Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Lessons in Disappearance (2012) and Knowing Time by Light (2010) were published by Blaine Creek Press. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frost were published from Elik Press.  His poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Sports Literate, Prairie Schooner, Bellingham Review, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Massachusetts Review, Terrain, and Water-Stone Review, among others.  He has essays forthcoming in Interim and Ocean State Review.     For years, in photography, poems, and essays, Long has chronicled the changes in the Great Salt Lake, its beauty and the dangers that wildfires and drought bring to the lake. Currently, he is advocating for saving the lake, participating with Brolly Arts in the project Evaporation: What Does it Take to Leave Enough Water for Great Salt Lake.  Evaporation aims to use the humanities in conjunction with science to promote the beauty of the lake, highlight the dangers to the lake, and work toward possible solutions to the the crisis we face.      He received the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award for Literary Arts and the Writers Advocate Award from Writers at Work.  He lives in Salt Lake City.                  Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.