Media Contact:
Derek Sheffield, WVC English faculty, 509-682-6737
Joan Qazi, WVC Geography faculty, jqazi@wvc.edu
Libby Siebens, community relations executive director, 509-682-6436 (Mon.-Thurs.)

In celebration of Earth Day (April 22) and Poetry Month (April), there will be a poetry reading featuring students and visiting writers, in addition to Earth Day-related activities throughout the day at Wenatchee Valley College on Monday, April 22.

From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. there will be activities around the fountain, including:

• Presentation at 12 p.m. by featured speaker Jim White, senior energy efficiency engineer at the Chelan County PUD and winner of the American-Made Solar Prize from the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Information tables featuring Link Transit, Chelan-Douglas Land Trust, Sustainable Wenatchee, Climate Conversations North Central Washington, Cascade Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group, Associated Students of WVC, City of Wenatchee, Chelan-Douglas Environmental Health, the WVC agriculture/natural resources club, the WVC art department and other organizations and student clubs.
• A sustainability tour of WVC at 11 a.m. led by Dr. Joan Qazi, WVC faculty. The tour will begin at the fountain.
• WVC students and staff can sign up to join the third annual EcoChallenge (a two-week challenge to be more environmentally-friendly) at the Sustainable Wenatchee booth. Learn more about the EcoChallenge at ecochallenge.org. The challenge begins in May.
• Students and staff can visit the Jack and Edna Maguire Student Recreation Center to participate in the recreation center’s all-day Earth Day fitness challenge, using the eco-powered cardio machines that put energy back into the grid, supplying the SRC with renewable energy.
  

From 1-2:30 p.m., a visiting writers and WVC student poetry reading will take place in The Grove Recital Hall. Student winners of the WVC Earth Day Poetry Contest will also be reading their work. Students can submit poetry to the competition until April 12 by emailing their original poems to Derek Sheffield at dsheffield@wvc.edu.

Visiting writers include Alison Hawthorne Deming, Simmons B. Buntin, and Chris Dombrowski.

Deming’s most recent books are the poetry collection “Stairway to Heaven,” the essay collection “Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit,” and “Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with photographer Stephen Strom.” She is the author of three additional nonfiction books and four previous poetry books including “Science and Other Poems,” which won the Walt Whitman Award. She is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and Regents’ Professor at the University of Arizona. Her work has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts among other honors.

Buntin is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments, the first online journal of place and the world’s longest-publishing online literary journal. He is the author of two books of poetry, “(Bloom and Riverfall)” and “Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places, a collection of sustainable community case studies.” His prose, poetry, and photography have appeared in Orion, ISLE, Kyoto Review, North American Review, Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society and elsewhere. In addition to his full-time job as web program manager at the University of Arizona, he teaches an occasional course at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and lectures on project management, community design and sustainability, editing and writing. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Dombrowski is the author of the memoir “Body of Water,” a Bloomberg News Best Book of 2016, as well as three full-length collections of poetry, most recently “Ragged Anthem.” His poems have appeared in over a hundred anthologies and journals including Guernica, Gulf Coast, Orion, Poetry, Poetry Northwest and The Southern Review. He has taught creative writing to a vast array of age groups, most recently as the William Kittredge Visiting Writer-in-Residence in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Montana. He lives in Missoula, where he guides the rivers, directs the Beargrass Writing Workshops, and makes his home with his loveably feral family.

This event is sponsored by the Wenatchee Valley College English Department, the WVC Sustainability Committee, the Alcoa Excellence in Teaching Award, Icicle Creek Center for the Arts, Write on the River, the ASWVC, and the WVC Foundation.

Daily parking passes on the Wenatchee campus cost $2. Parking permit machines are available in the Wells Hall/Music and Art Center, Smith Gym, Brown Library and Sexton Hall lots. Students must have valid WVC parking permits.

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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, wvc.edu.

Wenatchee Valley College is committed to a policy of equal opportunity in employment and student enrollment. All programs are free from discrimination and harassment against any person because of race, creed, color, national or ethnic origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, the presence of any sensory, mental, or physical disability, or the use of a service animal by a person with a disability, age, parental status or families with children, marital status, religion, genetic information, honorably discharged veteran or military status or any other prohibited basis per RCW 49.60.030, 040 and other federal and state laws and regulations, or participation in the complaint process. The following persons have been designated to handle inquiries regarding the non-discrimination policies and Title IX compliance for both the Wenatchee and Omak campuses:

• To report discrimination or harassment: Title IX Coordinator, Wenatchi Hall 2322M, (509) 682-6445, title9@wvc.edu.
• To request disability accommodations: Student Access Coordinator, Wenatchi Hall 2133, (509) 682-6854, TTY/TTD: dial 711, sas@wvc.edu.