Wednesday, July 2, Sundance Books and Music hosts a reading and book signing event celebrating two new collections of poetry from Black Rock Press: How The Light Gets In: New And Collected Poems 1969-2014 by Kirk Robertson, and The Rural Lives of Nice Girls by Gailmarie Pahmeier.
Poet, essayist, editor, publisher and artist, Kirk Robertson, will read from his new work, How the Light Gets In: New and Collected Poems 1969 – 2014. He has published more than twenty collections of poetry and his work has appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies.
Robertson is the recipient of several awards including the Wormwood Award for the Most Overlooked Book of Note and the Breakthrough Award from Watermark Press. In 1981, he received the Governor’s Arts Award for Excellence in the Arts and was elected to the Nevada Writer’s Hall of Fame in 1994. He has also written widely on the visual arts and a new collection of essays on art and artists is in preparation. He lives in Fallon, Nevada where he is Program Director for the Churchill Arts Council.
“Along with Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Robert Laxalt, Kirk Robertson is a Nevada literary pillar. Now finally we have a definitive collection of his work—funny, heartbreaking, rugged and insightful. Robertson’s poems are dipped into the heart of the West, both what it used to be and what it is today. How The Light Gets In is breathtaking and necessary reading. I couldn’t recommend it more highly,” says Willy Vlautin, The Motel Life and The Free.
Gailmarie Pahmeier reads from her work, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls: Poems New and Selected. Pahmeier has been a Nevadan for nearly 30 years. She currently teaches creative writing and contemporary literature courses at the University of Nevada, where she has been honored with the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award.
Her work has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including Booth, Passager, Interim, Mudfish, New Poets of the American West (for which she won the Editor’s Choice Award), Literary Nevada, and the Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. She is the author of the poetry collection The House on Breakaheart Road and two chapbooks from Black Rock Press. Shake It and It Snows, won the 2009 Coal Hill Chapbook Award; poems from this collection were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Her literary awards include a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship and two Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council. In 2007, she received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
“Gailmarie Pahmeier’s poems are lush, cinematic narratives from a singular American female voice, mesmerizing in their grace, masterful in their craft. As much as these poems are pure heart and soul, they are gems: pieces of art by a gorgeous spirit and a talent any poet should envy. These are the poems I wish I could write. fortunately I get to read them, again and again, a pure joy every time,” said Lee Herrick, Gardening Secrets of the Dead.
Join the celebration Wednesday, July 2, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., at Sundance Books and Music, 121 California Avenue, in Reno. Learn more at www.sundancebookstore.com.
This event is made possible through a partnership with Nevada Humanities and with support from the Nightingale Family Foundation.
