Slapering Hol Press Presents: Chapbook winner Tara Flint Taylor with T.Q. Tran (pre-recorded) & Ann Lauinger in person at HVWC (and live streamed via Zoom)

Please join the Slapering Hol Press co-editors as they welcome the 2022 chapbook winner, Tara Flint Taylor, for the annual Sanger-Stewart Memorial Reading. She will be joined by her mentor, TQ. Tran, and poet Ann Lauinger for a reading and Q&A about the process of putting together a first collection.

NB: This event will take place in person at HVWC and will also be live-streamed via Zoom. Please make sure to register for either in-person or online. The Zoom link will be sent immediately after registration to the email address you use to reserve your ticket. Check spam and email ask@writerscenter.org with any questions. The link will also be sent the day of the reading.

Tara Flint Taylor’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Poetry Quarterly, North American Review, Nimrod, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Inkwell Journal, and elsewhere. Her awards include second place in the 2011 River Styx International Poetry Contest as well as finalist in the 2011 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize. She is a graduate of Le Moyne College where she earned her BA, and of North Carolina State University, where she earned her MFA. Tara is the recipient of the John LaHey Award in Writing, the Newhouse Writing Award, and the Brenda Smart Poetry Prize. Originally from Syracuse, New York, she lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse, painter Joshua Flint.

Born in Vietnam, T.Q. Tran graduated from UC Berkeley and has traveled all seven continents including science support deployments to Antarctica. Her poems appear in Nimrod International Journal and Cincinnati Review. She currently lives in Portland, OR with her two sons and is working on a hybrid manuscript.

Ann Lauinger’s two books of poetry are Persuasions of Fall (University of Utah Press, 2004), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, and Against Butterflies (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2013). Her poems have appeared in publications from Alimentum to Zone 3, including The Cumberland River Review, Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Parnassus, The Same, SmartishPace, and The Southern Poetry Review. Translations from Italian, French, and Latin have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Levania, and Transference and are forthcoming in an anthology from Shanghai University Press. Her work has also been anthologized in Decomposition, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Poetry Daily Essentials, 2007, In a Fine Frenzy: PoetsRespond to Shakespeare, A Slant of Light, and Short Flights. She has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Martha Stewart Living Radio. Professor Emerita of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, she lives in Ossining, NY.

Tara Flint Taylor’s Bone Wishing names the shapes of grief: “a dark umbrella shaken / after hard rain,” an “iron anchor on the desert floor, the “empty pot on the stove tinged pink.” Then, with nothing but the gritty clarity of her eye and voice, Taylor goes about the hard work of «mak[ing] some makeshift / shelter for [the] self.» From the ruins emerges the indelible shelter of this profound and deeply felt collection.
—Linda Tomol Pennisi, author of The Burning Boat

Elegiacal, these poems ride on their images: salt water, sea glass, blood- red borscht. I admire their diction and shifting focus, though the speaker remains haunted throughout by a sister’s illness and the sorrow of loss. She looks back through the shadows of memory, past piles of broken china and “ruinous light,” through the undersea sediment of thousand-year-old plants into the eyes of her younger self, which are filled with wonder and grief at “the shock of ordinary things.” This is a fine first collection.
—Joseph Millar, author of Dark Harvest, New and Selected Poems