Saturday, July 23, 2011

Blackbird First Wednesday Readings, August 3rd

First Wednesdays, a series of readings, performances and wine-tasting are held at the Blackbird Wine Shop, 4323 NE Fremont, 7-9pm. This show is 21 and over. Contact Julie Mae Madsen at maemadsen@gmail.com or http://www.facebook.com/pages/First-Wednesday-Readings/111063515598491 for more information.

The readers for August 3rd are John A. Blackard, Matt Love & Kim Cooper Findling.

John Blackard is a graduate of the University of North Carolina. He has three books of poems in print (October Queen, 2007; House-Painting on Liberty Road, 2008; Pulling Apart, 2010) and a book about the golden age of paperback publishing (Vintage Paperback Sources, 2000). He has received Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. He lives in Portland, creates hand-made books in his basement man-cave, and works part-time as a medical assistant in a senior assisted-living community.

Matt Love is Caretaker of Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. He is the author of Love & the Green Lady: Meditations on the Yaquina Bay Bridge: Oregon’s Crown Jewel of Socialism, available at independent bookstores or through Nestucca Spit Press.com. Love is the author/editor of The Beaver State Trilogy, Citadel of the Spirit: Oregon’s Sesquicentennial Anthology, Super Sunday in Newport: Notes From My First Year in Town (part one of the Newport Trilogy) and Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker. He writes the “One Man’s Beach” column for Oregon Coast Today and the “On Oregon” blog for Powells. In 2009, Love won the Oregon Literary Arts’ Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award for his contributions to Oregon history and literature. He lives in South Beach and teaches English and journalism at Newport High School. He’s currently working on a book about the filming of Sometimes a Great Notion, the third installment in the Newport Trilogy.

Kim Cooper Findling is a nationally published essayist, journalist and author. She writes about just about everything, but mostly the people, places and stories of her home state, Oregon. In her debut as an author, Kim Cooper Findling’s Chance of Sun: An Oregon Memoir, unfolds the story of an Oregon girl coming of age in the 1970s and 80s, navigating her way through pick-up trucks, dive bars, higher education and backwoods trails before finding a place she belongs.