Saturday, March 4, 2-4 PM: Poets John Witte and Maxine Scates Book Signing, Meet and Greet, and 3 PM Reading
Maxine Scates’ fourth book of poems, My Wilderness, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2021. Her poems have been widely published in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ironwood, The New England Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Poetry and The Virginia Quarterly Review and have received, among other awards, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Stafford/Hall Award for Poetry and two Pushcart Prizes.
“With frank detail and philosophical clarity, Scates addresses parental loss, the passage of time, and the pain of childhood abuse. The book is driven by sorrow, but it is also devotional, guided by a determination to comprehend the elusive presences of other people, beauty, life. “
New Yorker
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John’s new Book is All That Matters Now (Lynx House Press). John Witte grew up in New England, the son of Polish immigrants. After college he worked as a carpenter before moving west to Oregon. Since then his poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among other anthologies.His poems have been translated, set to music, and recorded for the blind. He is the author of Loving the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), The Hurtling (Orchises Press, 2005), Second Nature (University of Washington Press, 2008), Disquiet (University of Washington Press, 2015), and All That Matters Now (Lynx House Press, 2022). For thirty years he was the editor of Northwest Review, as well as numerous books, including The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University Press, 2000). The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he taught Ecopoetry and other subjects at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he lives on the outskirts of town with his family.