Host Katherine Hastings airs a recording from her WordTemple Poetry Series featuring Ada Limòn, Greg Mahrer, and Julia Vose. Ada Limón is the author of four books of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her other books include Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California. “The lyrical genius of these poems sings to us of the perennial theme of home and our primordial ache of belonging. Ada Limòn captures all the nuances that these colossal words call to mind with the gorgeous voice of her diction, and the timbre of her images. Both soft and tender, enormous and resounding, her poetic gestures entrance and transfix.” — Richard Blanco, 2013 Presidential Inaugural Poet Sonoma County poet Gregory Mahrer reads from his first collection, A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent (Fordham University Press), winner of the Poets Out Loud prize. His work has been published in The New England Review, The Indiana Review, Green Mountains Review, Volt, Colorado Review, Haden’s Ferry Review and elsewhere, as well as the web sites Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Several of his poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 2014 one of those poems, “Refrain,” received a Pushcart Special Mention. WordTemple is very pleased to host the Sonoma County release of this fine book. Come support your local poet! “Let me say quite simply that Gregory Mahrer is the most dazzling poetic cartographer since Italo Calvino and Raymond Roussel, and Mahrer’s exquisite explorations of the imagination carry with them the same remarkable riches and glorious thirsts that we find in those great writers. Conceptually brilliant and relentlessly inventive, Greg Mahrer teaches us the many ways every map is made of language, and that geology, geography, and history must all be understood as deeply human psalms. In this astonishing new collection, there is only one direction left to the poet— beyond the page’s horizon.” — David St. John Sonoma County poet Julia Vose opens the program. Author of Moved Out on the Inside (The Figures Press), Vose is the winner of an Academy of American Poet’s Prize. Her poems have appeared in Deep Down (Farrar Strauss and Giroux); This is Women’s Work (Panjandrm); Changing Harm to Harmony: Bullies & Bystanders Project (Joseph Zaccardi, editor); Digging Our Poetic Roots — Poems from Sonoma County(Katherine Hastings, editor); American Poetry Review; and Marin Poetry Center anthologies. Vose has taught and/or consulted poetry writing at San Francisco State University and UC Exension, as a Writer-In_Residence at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, and with California Poets in the Schools.