On Thursday, March 11, Northwind Reading Series features Peter Quinn and John Willson. The readings start at 7 p.m. at Northwind Arts Center, 2409 Jefferson.

Peter Quinn is a poet and business person. Businessman poets are rare, but it works for him.  A graduate from Lewis and Clark College, he spent four years studying with Vern Rutsala, Tony Ostroff and William Stafford.  He has published in Mississippi Mud, Foxfire, the Portland Oregonian and Northwest Magazine. Peter is also the Development Director for the Northwest Maritime Center.  He continues to write poetry and lead workshops to feed his poetry passion.  Peter is currently working on a book, “The Poet Creeps Out.”

John Willson and Peter Quinn were classmates at Lewis and Clark College, and co-winners of the Academy of American Poets Award in 1976.  John is also a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and awards from the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference, the Artist Trust of Washington, and the King County Arts Commission. Blue Begonia Press published a collection of his poems, The Son We Had.  His poems have appeared in many journals including Cold Mountain Review, Crab Orchard Review, Kyoto Journal, and Northwest Review; and in such anthologies as Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry and Under Our Skin: Literature of Breast Cancer.  A two-time finalist in the National Poetry Series, he lives on Bainbridge Island, where he works as poetry workshop instructor for the Bainbridge Island Park District and as a bookseller at Eagle Harbor Book Company.  John is a collector of aloha shirts and rubber stamps.

On Thursday, March 25, Northwind Reading Series features Christine Hemp and Sands Hall. The readings start at 7 p.m. at Northwind Arts Center, 2409 Jefferson.

Christine Hemp has been awarded a Washington State Artist Trust Fellowship in Literature, a Barbara Deming/Money for Women grant, the Donald Murray Award at UC Davis, a residency at Vermont Studio Center, an Iowa Award for Literary Non-Fiction, and the Conway Award for Teaching Writing at Harvard University Extension. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review, Harvard Magazine, Boston Globe, Yale Anglers Journal, and American Falconry. Her art writing has appeared in Art & Auction, American Craft, and THE: Santa Fe’s Monthly Magazine of the Arts. Hemp, reading her poems and essays, has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition. She served as poet-in-residence at three of our National Parks, and her work is now available in the cosmos since a poem of hers blasted off on a 1998 NASA mission to monitor pre-natal activity of stars. She teaches at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival.

Sands Hall is the author of the novel Catching Heaven, a Random House Reader’s Circle selection, as well as a book of essays and exercises, Tools of the Writer’s Craft. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Iowa Review, the Green Mountains Review and Tahoe Quarterly, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Sands holds a second MFA in Theatre Arts. Her work as a playwright includes an adaptation of Alcott’s Little Women, which has received productions around the country, and her comic/drama Fair Use explores issues of copyright and ownership while examining the controversy surrounding Wallace Stegner’s use of the life and writings of Mary Hallock Foote to create his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose. Sands is also an actor, director, and musician; this summer she is directing The Fantasticks for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder. She is currently Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Northwind readings are free, though donations are gladly accepted to support Northwind Arts Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to connecting the arts to our community.  For more information contact Bill Mawhinney 360-437-9081.

(This announcement expires at 10:00pm on Sunday March 28th, 2010)