This reading and mixer event presents Lisa Vihos, the last 2017 resident for new the 100 Thousand Poets for Change On Lake Jackson Residency Program-Tallahassee, FL. Come out and mix it up! Local readers include: Susan Cerulean, Juan Carlos Galeano and Alex Quinlan. The evening will focus on environment and nature and the poet's role in making a difference.

ABOUT:

Lisa Vihos is the Poetry and Arts Editor of Stoneboat Literary Journal, an occasional guest blogger for Best American Poetry, and the Sheboygan, Wisconsin organizer for 100 Thousand Poets for Change. Along with two chapbooks, A Brief History of Mail (Pebblebrook Press, 2011) and The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012), her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines. She has two Pushcart Prize nominations and received first place recognition in the 2015 Wisconsin People and Ideas poetry contest. She was awarded the 2016-2017 Time-Out Grant from her undergraduate alma mater, Vassar College, to coordinate efforts to plan and build a children's reading garden to support literacy in Malawi, Africa. Visit her blog at Frying the Onion.

Susan Cerulean is a writer, naturalist, and activist who divides her time between Tallahassee and Indian Pass, in northwest Florida. Her 2015 nature memoir—Coming to Pass: Florida’s Coastal Islands in a Gulf of Change (University of Georgia Press) won the Gold Award for Florida Nonfiction by Florida Book Awards in 2016. Previous books include Tracking Desire: A Journey after Swallow-tailed Kites, UnspOILed: Writers Speak for Florida’s Coast, and Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf. She writes a regular column at www.comingtopass.com.

Juan Carlos Galeano is a poet, translator, and essayist born in the Amazon region of Colombia. He has published several books of poetry, and has translated North American poets into Spanish. Over a decade of fieldwork on symbolic narratives of riverine and forest people in the Amazon basin resulted in his production of a comprehensive collection of storytelling (Folktales of the Amazon, ABC-CLIO, 2008) the documentary film (The Trees Have a Mother, Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 2008) His poetry inspired by Amazonian cosmologies and the modern world (Amazonia 2003, 2011, and Yakumama and other Mythical Beings, 2014), has been anthologized and published in international journals such Casa de las Américas (Cuba), The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares (U.S.). He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where he teaches Latin American poetry and Amazonian Cultures at Florida State University. He is currently the director of the FSU Service/Learning Program: Journey into Amazonia in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest.

Alex Quinlan’s poems and nonfiction have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Tampa Review, among others, as well as in The Tusculum Review, where he has been a contributing editor. Alex is the editor of The Southeast Review and a reviewer for Scout: Poetry in Review. He is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University.