Poetry in the Gallery: Featuring Marsha de la O, Mary Ann McFadden & Mary Kay Rummel

Join us for a very special edition of Poetry in the Gallery!

This month, we will have three incredibly accomplished featured readers: Marsha de la O, Mary Ann McFadden and Mary Kay Rummel.

Open mic slots will be available on the door; no need to sign up in advance!

Poetry in the Gallery is free to attend for all students, SCIART members and performers.

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Marsha de la O is a lecturer in the English Department at California State University, Channel Islands, where she teaches poetry and creative writing. She is the author of Every Ravening Thing, Antidote for Night, and Black Hope. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, The Slowdown, and many journals, and she is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize. She lives with her husband in Ventura, California, where they founded the Ventura County Poetry Project to support local poetry.

Mary Ann McFadden is a poet who has just returned to the U.S. after 15 years living in Mazatlan and in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in 1995 and Eye of the Blackbird was published in 1997. Her poems have shown up in Green Mountains Review, Bloom, Psychology Tomorrow, The Marlboro Review, Southern Poetry Review, The American Voice, Moving Out, and elsewhere. In 2005, several poems were set to music by the composer Gerald Busby and performed at The Carnegie Center, New York City. McFadden taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and gave workshops at The New York City Libraries, and at the Biblioteca in San Miguel. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives in Riverside, California.

Mary Kay Rummel grew up in St. Paul near the Mississippi and the corner where Montreal, Lexington and West Seventh meet near Highland Park. She was the first Poet Laureate of Ventura County, CA. Little River of Amazements: New and Selected Poems is her tenth published poetry book, her eighth full collection. Blue Light Press also published Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone, Cypher Garden, The Lifeline Trembles, as a winner of the 2014 Blue Light Press Award and What's Left is the Singing. This Body She's Entered, her first book, won the Minnesota Voices Award for poetry and was published by New Rivers Press in 1989. It was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award. She was a recipient of a Loft Mentor award. Her work has appeared in numerous regional, national, and international literary journals and anthologies and has received several awards, including ten Pushcart nominations. She was a co-editor of Psalms of Cinder & Silt, a collection of community poems related to recent California wildfires published by Glenna Luschei at Solo Press. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies centered in both California and the Midwest including Water Stone Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, MiraMar, Anacapa Review, Gyroscope Review, Conestoga Zen, Pirene's Fountain, Salt, Askew, Spillway and as a frequent finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, in Nimrod.Mary Kay has read her poems in many venues in the US, England and Ireland and has been a featured reader at poetry festivals including in the Ojai Poetry Festival and San Luis Obisbo Poetry Fest. She has participated in numerous poetry residencies including Anderson House and Vermont Studio Center and performs poetry with musicians. She has collaborated with artists in the US and England, most recently at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. A Professor Emerita from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Mary Kay also taught at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, and at California State University, Channel Islands.