On Saturday, April 15 at 1:00 PM the North Bend Public Library, in partnership with Airlie Press, will be hosting a poetry reading entitled “Airlie Press Presents: Poetry from the Pacific Northwest.” The reading will feature PNW poets Carey Taylor, Kelly Terwilliger, and Connie Soper who will share selections from their latest works. Carey Taylor is the author of The Lure of Impermanence. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2022 Neahkahnie Mountain Poetry Prize for her poem “Birthday Fires.” Carey currently lives in Portland, Oregon, but as a child, she lived at the Coos Bay Lifeboat Station in Charleston, Oregon. She has said that the years she spent on the Oregon coast were instrumental in instilling in her a sense of place, which is a theme that frequently appears in much of her poetry. Kelly Terwilliger is also a Charleston native. Her childhood home overlooked Joe Ney Slough, and she spent her childhood roaming the local beaches, mudflats, and tidepools with her marine biologist parents. She has lived in Eugene for the past 25 years but still considers the coast her home. She is the author of two collections of poems – Riddle Fishhook Thorn Key and A Glimpse of Oranges. Kelly is a former editor and author with the Airlie Press poetry collective. She currently works as a writer, storyteller, and artist-in-residence in public schools in Oregon, and she is also working on a new collection of poetry and a video library of oral stories. Connie Soper grew up in Coos Bay and spent her childhood visiting the beaches of the Oregon coast. She hiked the Oregon Coast Trail in its entirety over three summers and wrote about her experience in her nonfiction book Exploring the Oregon Coast Trail. Connie Soper is a poet and hiker who finds inspiration from time spent in nature, specifically near the ocean. Her first book of poetry A Story Interrupted invites readers to “wander the trails of Oregon’s lush and fertile forests, and to celebrate its beaches, coastal cliffs, and headlands.” For more information about this event, contact the library at (541) 756-0400 or email nbservices@northbendlibrary.org.
