March 14, 2023 • SPEAKER SERIES • Anita Skeen & Laura DeLind – To Romp and Sing: The Music of Collaboration
Date: Tuesday, March 14, 2023
Time: 7:00 PM EST
Location: Virtual (Zoom)
Cost: A donation is required to attend this event. Please select either $1, $5, or $10 donation based on your financial capabilities. If a donation is a hardship right now, please reach out to us at info@friendsofroethke.org.
Description:
Artist Laura DeLind and poet Anita Skeen will read and show images from their latest collaborative book, Even the Least of These, and explain how the physical and emotional isolation of the COVID period resulted in their individual artistic “sighs.” Those sighs lengthened into the song that ultimately became their book, full of linocuts and lines which “romp and sing/within the reach of my imagining” as Theodore Roethke writes in his poem, “Renewal.”
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 RCAH Center for Poetry at MSU and 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 for over 40 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 is currently involved in writing projects with poets Jane Taylor and Cindy Hunter Morgan. With linocut artist Laura DeLind, she has recently completed a poetry manuscript, Even the Least of These: The 10-line Poem in the Time of Crisis.
About Laura Delind:
Artist Laura B. DeLind has been cutting and hand-printing linocuts for over 40 years. She loves linoleum as a carving medium because it is unpretentious, has no pre-existing texture, and lends itself to spontaneous, bold images.
“I am drawn to the linocut because of its challenges and contradictions. It is an accessible medium and, thus, quite democratic in nature. At the same time, it is an elegant art form, one that requires a strong sense of composition and design as well as a keen understanding of positive and negative space. I am fascinated by black and white design and by organic shapes. Birds frequently find themselves the subject of my prints as they provide me with a ready-made ‘excuse’ to play with shape and pattern and to see the world in simple, sensitive, and often whimsical ways.”
Laura lives and works in Mason, Michigan. All her editions are numbered and hand printed on ph neutral papers. She offers printmaking workshops in the Lansing area year round and has taught at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp as well as at Ghost Ranch (Abiquiu, NM) for many years. She exhibits her work nationally and her prints appear in public and private collections across the country. The Unauthorized Audubon (MSU Press: 2014) pairs her linocuts with the poetry of Anita Skeen. Her linocuts also appear in Lavender Hill Farm by Jennifer P. Otto (Mead Hill Press: 2015) and on the cover of The Organic Movement in Michigan (MOFFA: 2016). Some recent work can be seen here on her website.
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