Ellen Waterston Joins Round-Robin Poetry Reading September 8 at Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe

Reading includes award-winning poets Judith Montgomery and Penelope Scambly Schott

Bend-based poet and author Ellen Waterston will join poets Judith Montgomery and Penelope Scambly Schott for a round-robin evening of poetry Friday, September 8, 7pm atDudley’s Bookshop Café, 135 NW Minnesota Ave. in downtown Bend. The poets will take turns reading their work and providing perspective. The readings will be followed by an opportunity to ask questions and discuss the poems offered by each presenter. The event is free and open to the public.

Judith Montgomery
The poet’s poet,Judith H. Montgomery’s poems appear in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, and Cave Wall, among other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies. Her first collection, the chapbook “Passion,” received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry; “Red Jess,” a finalist for several national first book prizes, appeared in 2006; “Pulse & Constellation” (2007), a finalist for the Finishing Line Poetry Prize, followed. With the help of residencies at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon, she is working on two new manuscripts, “Litany for Wound and Bloom” (a finalist for the 2016 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize) and “Mutable Flame.”

Penelope Scambly Schott
Penelope Scambly Schott, author of a novel and several books of poetry, was awarded four New Jersey arts fellowships before moving to Oregon, where her verse biography, “A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth,” received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Several of Penelope’s books and individual poems have won other prizes. Forthcoming poetry titles in 2017 are “Serpent Love: A Mother-Daughter Epic” and “Bailing the River.” Her individual poems have appeared in APR, Georgia Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Penelope and her husband live in Portland, Oregon, where they host a series of poetry readings called The White Dog Salon. She also leads a coveted annual poetry workshop in Dufur, Oregon.

Ellen Waterston
Ellen Waterston’s fourth poetry title, “Hotel Domilocos,” was released April 2017 by Moonglade Press. Her verse novel “Vía Láctea, A Woman of a Certain Age Walks the Camino,” she converted to a libretto and it premiered as an opera in 2016. She is the winner of the Obsidian Prize in Poetry and her first and second titles, “Between Desert Seasons,” and “I Am Madagascar” both won the WILLA Award in Poetry. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies and journals and have been selected by Garrison Keillor for The Writer’s Almanac. Prose titles include “Where the Crooked River Rises” and “Then There Was No Mountain.” She is currently at work on a nonfiction title due out from University of Washington Press in 2018. Waterston is the executive director of PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon, an artists’ and scientists’ residency campus, and is the founder of the Waterston Desert Writing Prize and the Writing Ranch.

For more information about the reading, contact Dudley’s Bookshop Café at 541.749.2010.