Open Door Reading: Shirley Brewer, Kathleen Hellen, and Laura Shovan

Those of you who've been expecting video from last weekend's BookTalk event: It's coming (I hope) soon. It has been a busy week, and I've not been able to upload the video yet. Our Flip cameras need mending, so I used my home camera. With a little two-month old at home, I don't have a whole lot of time during the week. So my goal is to do it this weekend.

Speaking of this weekend, we have one event on Sunday. Our Open Door reading with Shirley Brewer, Kathleen Hellen, and Laura Shovan. The event is, as always, free. It begins at The Writer’s Center at 2:00 p.m.

Here are the poets’ bios:

Shirley J. Brewer (Baltimore, MD) is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. Shirley won first, second, and third Prizes in the Maryland Writers' Association 2010 Short Works Contest for Poetry, and honorable mention in Passager’s Poetry Contest in 2005 and 2009. She was nominated for a Pushcast Prize in 2009. Publication credits include: The Pearl, The Comstock Review, HazMat Literary Review, Edison Literary Review, Free Lunch, Manorborn, CALYX, Passager, and other journals. Her first collection of poems is A Little Breast Music.

Kathleen Hellen's work has appeared in Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, The Hollins Critic, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose, Prairie Schooner, RHINO Poetry, Salamander, Southern Poetry Review, Subtropics, WITNESS, among others. Awards include Washington Square Review, James Still, and Thomas Merton poetry prizes, as well as individual artist grants from the State of Maryland and Baltimore City. Forthcoming is her chapbook The Girl Who Loved Mothra. A graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University, she is a contributing editor for The Baltimore Review.

Poet Laura Shovan is an artist-in-education for Maryland State Arts Council. She has led children’s and adult writing workshops for The Maryland Humanities Council and CityLit Project’s “Write Here, Write Now” program. Her articles, essays, and poetry for adults and children have been published in newspapers, literary journals, and e-zines. Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone, her first poetry chapbook, won inaugural the Clarinda Harriss Poetry Prize. www.laurashovan.com.