EVENT: Poets to gather for Irene McKinney
Photo by Vic Burkhammer
Who: Irene McKinney, West Virginia’s poet laureate.
What: Poets come out to honor a writer of excellence.
When: 8 p.m., Monday, June 23, 2008.
Where: The Scottish Rite Temple, 406 Capitol St., Charleston, W.Va. (beside Kinko’s).
Why: It’s an exquisite thing to do — way, way worth doing.
Featured writers: Jayne Anne Phillips, Maggie Anderson, Diane Gilliam Fisher, Jeanne Bryner, Doug Van Gundy, Kate Long and Devon McNamara. McKinney will also read. Sponsored by the Charleston Gazette, thegazz.com and FestivALL Charleston.
RELATED:
Click here for one of a few previous MountainWord posts about McKinney, this one audio of a poem called “At 24″ she read at the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston last fall.
And view Long’s W.Va. Public Broadcasting interviews with Irene McKinney, three of them available on YouTube. They are a delight. Watch them here:
June 23rd, 2008 at 7:39 am
[…] Click here to check out earlier blog posts about Irene McKinney: […]
June 24th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
[…] Last night’s homage to the powerful, vivid poetry of W.Va. Poet Laureate Irene McKinney drew a crowd of more than 100 people to the cool confines of the Scottish Rite Temple auditorium in downtown Charleston, W.Va. McKinney, set to read herself, was, alas, absent at the gazz/FestivALL 2008 event, from the trials of coping with cancer treatment. Yet as one reader of her poem’s noted, she was certainly there. How could she be not when her luminous poems were there, her life’s DNA encoded into words, certainly as rich, imagistic and evocative as any poetry ever to come out of the hills of West Virginia. […]
March 25th, 2009 at 9:20 am
[…] Click here to check out some earlier blog posts about Irene McKinney. […]