Registration now closed

A Night of Poetry

with Beth Tornes and Kathy Fagan

Award-winning poet and Bexley alum, Elizabeth (Beth) Tornes will be reading from her most recent poetry collection, Northern Skies, which was published in June 2022.

Join us for a night of poetry and conversation with award-winning poets Beth Tornes and Kathy Fagan. Beth Tornes is a Bexley alum who has published several award-winning poetry collections and will be reading from her most recent collection, Northern Skies, which was published in June 2022. Kathy Fagan, the Director of Creative Writing and the MFA program at The Ohio State University, is an award-winning poet who will be reading from her collection, Bad Hobby, which was published in September 2022.

Beth Tornes has published four award-winning poetry collections, Between the Dog and the Wolf (Five Oaks Press, 2016), New Moon (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and Snowbound (Giiwedin Press, 2011). Her most recent book, Northern Skies, came out in June 2022 from Muriel Press. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell Colony and Yaddo Colony for the Arts. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, including The American Poetry Journal, Boulevard, The Comstock Review, Main Street Rag, The Missouri Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Ploughshares, and Solstice Literary Magazine. She has also published a collection of Ojibwe oral histories, Memories of Lac du Flambeau Elders (2014, U. of Wisconsin Press). She has lived in Lac du Flambeau, a Chippewa reservation in northern Wisconsin, for the last 26 years.

Kathy Fagan is the author of Bad Hobby and Sycamore, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, as well as four previous collections including The Charm, the National Poetry Series-winning The Raft, and Vassar Miller Prize-winner MOVING & ST RAGE. A former NEA fellow, she is currently the Director of Creative Writing and the MFA program at Ohio State University, and Poetry Editor for OSU Press.

Praise for Northern Skies (Beth Tornes):

Part elegy, part praise song, the poems in Northern Skies will awaken you again to the beauty in this world “darkened by history.” In a book that recounts the inherited art of giving, Beth Tornes practices it herself in these pages—offers the reader delicately drawn images of place, quiet surprises in her turns of phrase, and gems of memory and family stories. Follow the poet’s eye to fairy grasshoppers in bicycle spokes, listen with her to “river reeds / hissing like snakes in the slanted rays of sun,” and let her teach you to measure in teaspoons the sweet weight of bird song. These poems are gifts that will live in the “soft tanks of our bodies,” will teach us to treasure each “token of life’s abundance, and its brevity.” – Kimberly Blaeser, author of Copper Yearning, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16 

Praise for Bad Hobby (Kathy Fagan):

"I drank Kathy Fagan's Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can't imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan's subject is loss—the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia's distances: 'I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.' 'The art of losing,' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up." —Maggie Smith

Upcoming events