PORT ANGELES — In another free Foothills Writers Series event, Spokane-based poet Nance Van Winckel will read from her newest book, Pacific Walkers, on Wednesday.
Admission is free to the hourlong program at 12:35 p.m. in the Maier Performance Hall at Peninsula College, 1502 E. Lauridsen Blvd.
Pacific Walkers contains poems written in various voices: of a reporter for the Daily Sun, of a child, of a ghost and of Van Winckel herself.
The poetry also gives an imagined voice to anonymous deceased people listed in the Spokane County medical examiner’s records.
Then it shifts to named but now-forgotten people in a discarded early 1900s photo album found in a secondhand store.
Van Winckel’s other books of poetry include Bad Girl, with Hawk and After a Spell, which received the Washington State Governor’s Award for Poetry.
Pacific Walkers is Van Winckel’s sixth volume of poetry, released last month by the University of Washington Press.
The writer also has received two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, Poetry magazine’s Friends of Literature Award, two Washington State Artist Trust awards and honors from the Poetry Society of America.
Now a teacher in the Vermont College of Fine Arts’ writing program, Van Winckel also has taught at the Centrum Writers Conference in Port Townsend, Wordstock in Portland, Ore., and at Seattle’s Hugo House.
These days, she works on what she calls “photoems,” creations melding her own photography with small poems she imposes, graffiti-like, onto the pictures’ surfaces.
For information on this Foothills Writers Series event and other free public activities at the college, visit www.pencol.edu or the Peninsula College page on Facebook.
Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5062, or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
