4 Women Reading Women

Press Release
A Women's History Month literary event in Ukiah
4 Women Reading Women, March 18, 2011, 7 pm, Grace Hudson Museum

To commemorate Women’s History Month, 4 local women writers will celebrate the works and contributions of various women writers of their choice. Donna Kerr, Mary Norbert Körte, Linda Noel, and Theresa Whitehill will offer a reading Friday, March 18, 7pm at the Grace Hudson Museum.

The 4 women come from varied backgrounds, including
:
- Körte, who received a post graduate degree in Silver Latin; she studied and hung out with some of the great Beat Poets, including Lew Welch and William Everson, before relocating to the Noyo River basin where she has resided for nearly 40 years

- Kerr, a librarian for Mendocino County for twenty years who channels the words of Dorothy Wordsworth and has published 2 poetry chapbooks and been a keynote speaker at the UkiaHaiku Festival

- Noel, who is a Koyungkowi California Native who grew up in Willits, where she discovered poetry while a student at Willits High School; she has been published in anthologies and journals and served as Ukiah Poet Laureate 2006-200
;
- Whitehill, who is a graphic designer and letterpress printer; her latest book, A Grammar of Longing, was released in 2009 by Pygmy Forest Press; her poetry broadsides and commissioned poetry hang in university libraries throughout the country; she is the current Ukiah Poet Laureate.

The women have made their own selections of the writers they wish to present including personal favorites, those who have inspired them or a larger following through their writings, and women who have had a profound impact on not only the literary world but society and culture, including: Anne Sexton, Joy Harjo, Gertrude Stein, Emily Dickinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Sharon Olds, Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich and Leslie Silko.

Light refreshments will be offered following the reading which is free of charge with donations welcomed.

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April is Poetry Month--a poem for each day we are open

Well we did not make a poem a day--too few hours and much too much to do, but I hope you have enjoyed our choices.


From Ukiah's new Poet Laureate: Theresa Whitehill

He Brought Me Chocolate for my Hair

He brought me chocolate for my hair.
I spoke to him of power and loneliness.
I began to have qualms about the cornichons
how little they were, and sparkly with salt.
We slept under our felicity.
At every intersection, a tomato, a regret.
Morning began to develop cracks in its armature.
The gifts of drunkenness,
the long path to the sea.


Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day – April 29, 2009

DIANE ACKERMAN

SCHOOL PRAYER

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell – on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.