A Night I'll Remember

Thursday, July 1st, 2021: Reading my poems in public with a real, live audience for the first time since the Covid shut-down was magical for me in a number of ways, and being a part of the first ArtHop in over 16 months was an honor. There was a full house, made up of ArtHoppers, some old friends, some Fresno poets, some of my music friends, and my husband Ron, son Nick and daughter Victoria--along with her husband Matthew and their son Waylon, were there to support me. I was deeply touched to have former students AND three of my former teachers in the audience. That meant the world.

As I was curating my poems for this reading, I discovered a surprising continuity between the poems in my first book, Sightlines, the second, Vanishing Point, and now my third collection, which is still in revision and yet to be published. These poems grew out of the last 20+. years of my life, but I'd never sat down and read them through chronologically before. I'll be thinking about this, and how my poems work off of and sometimes revisit each other's subject matter for a long time.