From staytonevents.com:
Poets Henry Hughes and Sandra Stone in Stayton
After a one-month summer holiday, Stayton’s Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings will resume on Sunday, September 13, with a reading by poets Henry Hughes of Monmouth and Sandra Stone of Portland, both past winners of the Oregon Book Award in poetry. As part of the series’ continuing celebration of Oregon’s sesquicentennial, they will read not only from their own work but also from past Oregon poets who have influenced them—Hughes from Raymond Carver, Stone from Mary Barnard. The reading will take place from 3 to 5 p.m. in the studio of artist Paul Toews at 349 N. Third Ave., where it shares space with the Stayton Friends of the Library Used Bookstore. Admission will be free; donations are appreciated. Books by both featured poets will be for sale at the reading, and they will sign copies. Audience members are invited to bring one or two short poems to share during an open part of the reading.
Starting from opposite edges of the continent—Hughes in eastern Long Island, Stone in Seattle, Seaside, and Los Angeles—both these poets have absorbed the rhythms of water. “Nature—mostly the sea, the sound, the endless bays and marshes—was my first real theatre of experience,” says Hughes. From her childhood, Stone remembers “the undulant stilled surface of Puget Sound” at Seattle, “the great gray pumice-crested Pacific” at Seaside, and the “white-foam-flecked navy Pacific” at Venice Beach.
From the Atlantic coast, Hughes headed west—first to South Dakota on a football scholarship to Dakota Wesleyan University, then to Purdue University in Indiana for an M.A. in writing and— after an interlude of five years teaching English in Japan and China—a Ph.D. in American literature. Even inland, he was drawn to water, in Indiana spending “many hours fishing and boating on the Tippecanoe River, Wildcat Creek, and Wabash River.” Now in Oregon, where he moved in 2002 to take a teaching position at Western Oregon University, he loves the cold rivers where he fishes for steelhead and salmon.
Hughes’ first book of poems, Men Holding Eggs, received the 2004 Oregon Book Award in poetry. He has been very happy that this has brought his poetry to a much wider audience than it might otherwise have found. He especially enjoys responses to his work in questions from listeners at readings and in cards and emails with comments from readers. More important to him than the success that his first book has enjoyed is writing itself, which he sees as a way of keeping mentally alive. His poems, he says, “are stories told in the mind’s music.” In Stayton, he will be reading primarily from his second book, Moist Meridian, just published by Mammoth Books.
Sandra Stone began what she calls her “haywagon ride as a writer” with playwriting—at the age of five. She continues to write plays and short fiction as well as poetry, and has been awarded fellowhips in fiction from Literary Arts and from Breadloaf, and in playwriting from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2000 she had what she describes as “the shocking distinction of winning a national competition for an amazing honorarium, plus a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to Japan . . . by writing 24 words.” She is now collaborating with a composer on a libretto for a comic opera. Besides writing, Stone works as a conceptual artist in collaboration with architects “to create a poetic narrative in public interiors and the landscape,” and is an exhibited assemblagist with purchase awards for boxed works.
In 1996 Stone sent a 100-page sheaf of poems, none of them previously published or even submitted, to Cleveland State University’s annual manuscript competition and “was stunned by the news I’d won.” Her sheaf of poems became Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Café, which was then selected by Agha Shahid Ali as winner of the 1998 Oregon Book Award. More recently, Stone’s poetry has been recognized by the 2008 Dana Award for “mastery, substance, and inventive use of language.” A selection of 13 of her poems is forthcoming in the Fall 2010 issue of Midwest Quarterly, where she will be the featured poet. In Stayton, Stone will be reading both earlier and recent work, as well as poems by Mary Barnard, whom she came to know when working as editor for Breitenbush Books, which published Barnard’s Collected Poems.
Now in its eighth year, Stayton’s Second Sundays Series of Poetry Readings is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Marion Cultural Development Corporation, which also provides funding for donation of featured poets’ books to the Stayton Public Library. For more information, contact series coordinator Eleanor Berry at 503-859-3045 or eberry@wvi.com.
