April 20 Virtual Spring Reading Series: “Even the Least of These” (featuring Anita Skeen and Laura Delind)
Join us on Tuesday, April 20, 2021 at 7:00 pm EST for our Spring Reading Series event: Even the Least of These featuring Anita Skeen and Lauren Delind.
About Anita Skeen
Anita Skeen is currently Professor Emerita in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University where she is the Founding Director of The Center for Poetry. and currently the Series Editor for Wheelbarrow Books. She taught students in kindergarten through high school while working with the Kansas Arts Commission’s Artist in the Schools Program; in traditional venues such as college classrooms as a Visiting Writer and Writer in Residence; and in senior citizens’ centers, libraries, and at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. She has been the Coordinator of the Creative Arts Program at Ghost Ranch for 41 years, and the Fall Writing Festival for 23 years.
She is the author of six volumes of poetry: Each Hand A Map (1986); Portraits (1990); Outside the Fold, Outside the Frame (1999); The Resurrection of the Animals (2002); Never the Whole Story (2011); When We Say Shelter (2007), with Oklahoma poet Jane Taylor; and The Unauthorized Audubon (2014), a collection of poems about imaginary birds accompanied by the linocuts of anthropologist/visual artist Laura B. DeLind. With Taylor, she co-edited the literary anthology Once Upon A Place: Writings from Ghost Ranch (2008).
Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Collaboration is an important aspect of her work and she currently is involved in writing projects with poets Jane Taylor and Cindy Hunter Morgan, and visual artist Laura DeLind.
You can purchase Anita Skeen’s books at Michigan State University Press or Amazon.
About Laura Delind
About Laura Delind
Laura has been cutting and hand-printing block prints for over 40 years. She enjoys working with linoleum because it is an unpretentious medium, has no pre-existing texture, and lends itself to bold, spontaneous images.
Laura is drawn to the challenge of black and white design and to the problems presented through the interactions of positive and negative space. Organic shapes figure repeatedly in her work. Birds, especially, provide a read-made “excuse” to play with shape and pattern and to see the world in simple, sensitive, and often whimsical ways. The Unauthorized Audubon (MSU Press: 2014), a collaboration with poet Anita Skeen, nicely illustrates her printmaking style and perspective. Laura has taught print-making classes at Michigan State University, Grove Gallery and Studios, the Lansing Art Gallery, and Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp as well as intensive, week-long workshops at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, NM. In addition to her on-going ‘call and response’ work with Anita Skeen, Laura’s prints appear in Lavender Hill Farm by Jennifer Otto (Mead-Hill Press: 2015), and on the cover of The Organic Movement in Michigan (MOFFA: 2017).
