Dear friends and colleagues,
We are excited to announce the first three events of AEPL’s fall 2023 online series. All events are offered free of charge and will take place on Zoom. Click here to register to attend one or more of the events (or paste this link in your browser: https://forms.gle/GmMJ6xPQjek69FzX9)! Registered participants will receive a Zoom link 1-2 days before each event.
Friday, August 4, 3-4:30pm EST
Poetry Reading & Workshop with Libby Falk Jones – Open to all writers! (Part 1)
Friday, August 11, 3-4:30pm EST
Poetry Reading & Workshop with Libby Falk Jones – Open to all writers! (Part 2)
Former AEPL Chair Libby Falk Jones will share some poems from her new collection, For Your Good Health, Drink Flowers (Bass Clef Books, 2023)** as invitations for you to explore family relationships, landscapes, and language. Your writing may take any form – poetry or prose. Attend either or both sessions.
Friday, September 15, 3-4:30pm EST
AEPL Conversation Circle: Autoethnography as Resistance in the Academy
Join AEPL board members Liz DeBetta, Ph.D. and RAsheda Young, Ph.D Candidate, for a conversation about Liz’s new book Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal: Migrating Toward Wholeness and how autoethnography can be used to disrupt the canon and provide opportunities for critical writing that is humanizing, reflective, and grounded in theory.
The purpose of Conversation Circle is to give all members the chance to share their publications or works in progress with their colleagues. Let us know if you’d like to be next!
**Praise for Libby Falk Jones’s For Your Good Health, Drink Flowers:
“Season your milkshake with anemones/bubbling from a silver faucet,” Libby Falk Jones advises
in For Your Good Health, Drink Flowers, and we know we are in the presence of a poet alert to the natural world, serene at the shimmering edge of the surreal—secure in her poetic vision. These are earthly, embodied poems, imbued with the energy of a woman in motion— traveling, hiking, pocketing stones so alive they feel like her “own mortality jingling.” “This is how I want to die,” she declares in the collection’s penultimate poem, “grounded, held//by a body, . . . feeling flesh . . .[the] weight of earth—//we matter.” Her poetry renders the visceral joy and sorrow of familial love alongside vivid experiences of aloneness. Distilled from a lifetime of close observation, the poems in this capacious collection embrace stillness and motion, relationship and solitude, declaring the necessary sustenance in each
Leatha Kendrick, author of And Luckier
Libby Falk Jones’s latest collection is a compendium of wonder. Wonder of snow geese in flight looking down on the viewer as an exploded milkweed, wonder in the taste of mulberries that are a “sunset in the mouth,“ wonder in mountain shadows of Death Valley that reflect a “riotous impermanence.” It is also a testament of the heart in which the human voice can attend to what it means to be human. As a bonus, it is a glossary of poetic forms masterfully embodied in ghazals and pantoums, cinquains and deft villanelles as well as more familiar haikus and sonnets, a demo of the ways an accomplished poet catches the world in all its shimmering immediacy. This is a read that awards all of us ample dividends.
Richard Taylor, Kentucky Poet Laureate 1999-2001
Please join us!
With gratitude and encouragement,
AEPL’s Executive Committee
Geraldine DeLuca, Chair
Nate Mickelson, Associate Chair
Jonathan Marine, Treasurer/Membership Chair
Liz DeBetta, Secretary
Lisa Blankenship, CCCC Co-Liaison
Eric Leake, CCCC Co-Liaison
RAsheda Young, Ex-Officio Member
Dan Weinstein, Ex-Officio Member
Click here to learn more about the Assembly’s work!