Join us on Monday, May 22nd at 5:30 pm for an In Conversation event with local creative Lib Ramos. She’ll be chatting about the newest book from Good Printed Things, Holding Patterns: A Collection of Words on Ritual.

A walk. A cigarette. A laundry cycle. A prayer. From the ceremonial to the subliminal, ritual works its way into each of our lives. This book of poems, prose, and short stories is a collection of words from 29 voices on rituals of every kind, and the ways that they save us, challenge us, and utterly shape who we are.

We’re excited to have Lib in store with us and can’t wait to hear all about this collection, Good Printed Things, and what it’s like working with so many local creatives.

So don’t miss out on this free event!

PEOPLE INVOLVED IN THIS COLLECTION

Editors

Beth Ables, Angie Toole Thompson

Contributing Writers

Zebib K. Abraham, Rasha Abdulhadi, Gale Acuff, Abigail Bergey, Angelina Oberdan Brooks, Chris Andrei Cruz, Jelena Dunato, Jacob Edwards, Donna Faulkner née Miller, Zary Fekete, Melina Flowers, Rebecca Fremo, Shannon Greene, Tom Hartig, Emily Hockaday, Valerie Hunter, Morgan Johnson, Abby Moore Keith, Susan L. Lin, Vishaal Pathak, Marisca Pichette, Daniel A. Rabuzzi, Ojo Taiye, Kerry Trautman, Padmanabh Trivedi, Miller Voigt, Madeline Wilkins, Kate Young

ABOUT LIB RAMOS

With a background in print design, Lib has spent her career designing for a variety of companies. Her enthusiasm for handmade goods and the makers behind them led her to co-found Indie Craft Parade in 2010. She now serves as the Creative Director for The Makers Collective, a non-profit whose mission is to empower creative entrepreneurs while cultivating a supportive community around them.

She is a wife, mother, and an advocate for the maker community. Currently working on small batch collaborative projects at goodprintedthings.com.

You will find Tom Tenbrunsel a delightfully refreshing poet with a wide variety of subject matter and a style somewhere between Sandburg, Frost and the late Appalachian poet James Wright. Tom challenges one’s whit with a refreshing array of non-conforming rhyme, structure, rhythm and oft made-up words and hidden meanings. Uniquely Tom includes a photo and Author’s Notes with each poem. Join us in May to engage the spirit and myth of poetry with Tom’s “Poetry on my Mind”

Casual Poetry/Poetry on my Mind. Tom will read a couple poems for fun. He will ask guests to write a
short poem from a prompt with feedback from the group. Tom would like guests to feel free to bring short
poems to read and discuss. He encourages questions about writing poetry, about a poem of his or his
journey as a poet or his Self Help Series. So familiarize yourself with his works by scanning his website,
tenbrunsel.com Comments or questions are welcomed. Or feel free to email him in advance at
[email protected].  Check out his website tenbrunsel.com before the workshop. Send in one of your
poems to be commented on by Tom.

This workshop is open to writers of all skill levels and is a fun way to find inspiration from a new prompt or revise current work. It is hosted by the Friends of Carl Sandburg at Connemara and will use Microsoft Teams for the virtual connection. Sign up to attend the workshop here!

A writer and a poet, Dr. Tenbrunsel enjoyed a long successful career in Clinical Psychology. Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Tom graduated from Bellarmine University, obtained his doctorate from St Louis University in 1969. He taught, published and was in administration at Michigan State University and was VP for Advancement at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. He and his wife reside in the Appalachians of Western North Carolina. They have three successful children and eight grand grandchildren. Dr T. enjoys photography, gardening, cycling, hiking, camping and stalking the elusive trout. His writings and publications speak for themselves. He has published numerous books including:  Casual Gardening,  Poetry on My Mind, The Fund Raising Resource Manual,  The Fund Raising Handbook, Fund-Raising and Grantsmanship:  Getting Money from the Community for the Community, The Lansing Area Doctors Directory, 1&2,   Dissertation “A Group Coupon Economy Program in Treating Mental Illness:  An Experiment in Social Innovation”,   A Wrinkle in My Time: My Memoirs (a work in progress)

Join us on Thursday, June 22nd at 5:30 pm for an In Conversation event with poet Len Lawson. He’ll be chatting about his latest poetry collection Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane. We’re excited to have Len in store with us and can’t wait to hear all about his writing processes and inspirations. So don’t miss out on this free event!

ABOUT THE POETRY COLLECTION

Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane enters the maelstrom of institutionalized racism and cruelty to aim an unflinching gaze at the violence, neglect, and delusions borne of Southern race ritual. These poems wield knives against slavery’s tumultuous afterlife, cutting us free, guiding us through thickets of scar tissue and nightmare till we glean the brutal clarity of American sin and bear witness to the wondrous power of Len Lawson’s artistic and historical imagination. ~Herman Beavers

Len Lawson is, above all, a talented lyricist whose candid chronicles of working in the field of mental illness—the patients’ trauma caused largely by the institutions supposed to treat and protect them—provides an insight into a realm plagued by racism and abuse, one often ignored and silenced by the world at the large. We come to learn of Lawson’s speaker’s interactions with Brock Bridges who “loved butterflies” and often too tried to escape the establishment, “thinking like the statue/chewing petals off that flower.” Though the speaker tries to keep a line between him and his patients, dealing with his own issues concerning his own happiness and the weight of family memory and present circumstances, all their lives are intertwined even in times of doubt: “I didn’t trust those butterflies like Brock did…Matter of fact I hate butterflies//They give people false hope//Everything can’t have wings/Everybody wasn’t made to fly//Ask all them Africans that didn’t/grow wings still on the plantation.” Lawson explores the larger implications of historical violence and survival, never flinching away (” If you show me this box/hovering up and down/heaven and earth,/I will show you/a casket/lowered into/a world’s eye”) through a variety of many (often experimental) free verse possibilities, and I too can be candid, this is one of the best collections of poetry I’ve ever read. Get it now. Lawson is going places. ~Rose Ben-Oni

Lawson’s Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane constructs a fictional institution based on actual 20th century mental asylums for Black people. This haunting, stark series of vignettes of people who occupy such spaces traverse through surprising and dangerous spaces in the mind. History starts surrounding us as an eerie specter seeping into the present, where mental health is now a demand as part of freedom in America. ~Tara Betts, author of Refuse to Disappear

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Len Lawson is author of Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Press, 2021). He received a 2022 Fresh Voices in the Humanities Governor’s Award from South Carolina Humanities. Len has earned fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. His poetry appears in African American Review, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. A South Carolina native, Len earned a PhD in English Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Harry Potter Trivia Night

Join us on Thursday, August 17th at 5:30 pm for an In Conversation event with award winning poet Glenis Redmond!

The first Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina, Glenis has received the highest arts award in South Carolina, the Governor’s Award, and was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She’ll be talking about her collection The Listening Skin. We’re honored to have Glenis in store with us and can’t wait to hear all about her writing process and inspirations, and hear her answer questions about her collection.

So don’t miss out on this free event!

BOOK SUMMARY

Hewing close to the bone, the incendiary poems in The Listening Skin explore how an artist dares to dance and create through a pain-riddled body. Corporeal and spiritual, immediately personal and deeply historical, Redmond’s latest collection details how generational cycles of poverty, mental and physical illness, and systemic racism impact the self, the family, and the greater African-American collective. Examining the connection between adverse childhood experiences and adult chronic conditions, Redmond’s poems arise from her deepest listening, beyond the skin, rooted in the marrow. They speak to the hardship of enduring fibromyalgia and the ongoing challenges of multiple myeloma while rejoicing in survival and the grace of existence itself. Yes, The Listening Skin affirms life and demands the dignity its speaker deserves: “I am full of this past present heat / I carry. / I come to the shore, / but I vacate nothing.” This consummate work honors embodied knowledge, all that’s heard at the boundary between flesh and air, vacating nothing, determinedly and brilliantly whole.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Glenis Redmond is the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She is a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, and a Cave Canem alumni. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone (Underground Epics, 2000), Under the Sun (Main Street Rag, 2002), and What My Hand Say (Press 53, 2016), Listening Skin (Four Way Books), Three Harriets & Others (Finishing Line Press), and Praise Songs for Dave the Potter, Art by Jonathan Green, and Poetry by Glenis Redmond (University of Georgia Press). Glenis received the highest arts award in South Carolina, the Governor’s Award and inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She is a “Charlie Award” recipient awarded by the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival and was recently a recipient of the Peacemaker Award by the Upstate Mediation Center in 2022.

Glenis was born on Shaw AFB in Sumter, South Carolina. She presently resides in Greenville. She was the founder of the Greenville Poetry Slam in the early 90’s. Glenis confesses that she is Bi-Carolinian as she lived in Asheville, North Carolina for seventeen years and was a vital leader in the poetry scene in the 90’s. During that time, she was a Southern Fried Slam champion of the individuals twice and ranked twice in the top ten at the National Poetry Slam. Glenis helped found Word Slam, a poetry slam for teens in Asheville, NC. She was awarded the WNC Best Poet through the Mountain Xpress so many times, she was placed in the Hall of Fame. She is a North Carolina Literary Fellowship recipient and helped to create the first Writer-in-Residence program at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina. She received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College while touring full-time as a poet and mother-of-twins, Amber, and Celeste Sherer. She is now a Gaga to three grandchildren Julian and Paisley and newborn, Quinn.

Glenis has spent almost three decades touring the country as a poet and teaching artist. She served as the Poet-in-Resident for the Peace Center in Greenville and the State Theatre in New Brunswick, NJ. As a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist, for seventeen years, Glenis has created and facilitated poetry workshops for school districts across the country.

Since 2014, she has served as the mentor poet for the National Student Poets Program through Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In the past she has prepared these exceptional youth poets to read at the Library of Congress, the Department of Education, and for First Lady Michelle Obama at The White House.

Her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, storySouth and The New York Times, as well as numerous literary journals nationally and internationally. Glenis believes poetry is the mouth that speaks when all other mouths are silent.