Media Contact:
Libby Siebens, community relations executive director, 509-682-6436 (Mon.-Thurs.)
Heather Ryan, English faculty, 509-682-6720

Poets Keetje Kuipers and Elyse Fenton will be doing a reading at WVC on Oct. 24. The reading will be from 2-3 p.m. in The Grove Recital Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

Both poets have published award-winning collections of poetry and currently reside in the Pacific Northwest.

This event is sponsored by the Alcoa Wenatchee Works using the annual Alcoa Excellence in Teaching Award funds.

Keetje Kuipers has been a Stegner fellow, a Bread Loaf fellow, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, her poems, essays and short stories have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Poetry. Her first book, “Beautiful in the Mouth,” was selected by Thomas Lux as winner of the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published by BOA Editions. Her second book, “The Keys to the Jail” (BOA, 2014), was nominated for the LA Times Book Prize. Previously a tenured Associate Professor at Auburn University, she now lives and writes in Seattle, where she teaches at Hugo House and is an associate editor at Poetry Northwest.

Elyse Fenton is the author of the poetry collections, “Clamor,” winner of the 2010 Dylan Thomas Prize and the Bob Bush Memorial Award, and “Sweet Insurgent” (Saturnalia 2017), winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Brain, Child, and Prairie Schooner, and has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and PRI’s The World. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon, where she is at work on a novel.

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Wenatchee Valley College enriches North Central Washington by serving educational and cultural needs of communities and residents throughout the service area. The college provides high-quality transfer, liberal arts, professional/technical, basic skills and continuing education for students of diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds. Visit our website, www.wvc.edu