We are excited to announce our next Virtual Speaker event will be on Tuesday, December 1 at 7:00pm EST. We welcome Patricia Clark and Fleda Brown. Please click here to register. A Zoom link will be emailed on the day of the event..

Patricia Clark is the author of The Canopy (Terrapin Books, 2017), her fifth book of poetry, which won the 2018 PSV Book of the Year Award, and three chapbooks, including Deadlifts (New Michigan Press, 2018). She teaches in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University in Michigan where she is also the university's poet in residence.She has won The Fourth River’s Folio Competition, Mississippi Review’s Poetry Prize, second prize in the Pablo Neruda/Hardiman Prize from Nimrod, and was the co-winner of Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize. She has completed residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Colony, and The Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. She was also the poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2005-2007, and for many years she coordinated Poetry Night, part of GVSU’s Fall Arts Celebration. To order her books online, please visit Terrapin Books.

Fleda Brown’s tenth collection of poems, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm  (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her new memoir, Mortality, with Friends will be out from Wayne State University Press Fall 2021. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware and was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. To order her books online, please visit Brilliant Books. 

A $5 donation to FOTR is requested for event registration as we continue to raise money to save the Stone House. However, we recognize that finances are tight these days for many reasons, so the donation is not required. If you do not have a PayPal account, or if the $5 is a hardship right now, please email us directly, info@friendsofroethke.org, and we will manually register you. A Zoom link will be provided to all registrants before the start of the event.