The Word Works, Poet Lore, and The Writer’s Center present Café Muse, featuring Barbara Ras and Maggie Smith. The chatroom opens at 7pm and features Classical guitar by Michael C. Davis and set to a photo slideshow. Registration is free but required to get the Zoom link. To do so go to https://sites.google.com/view/cafe-muse-events/home
Barbara Ras is the author of four poetry collections: The Blues of Heaven (Pitt Poetry Series, 2021), The Last Skin (Penguin, 2010), which won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Book of 2010, One Hidden Stuff (Penguin, 2006), and Bite Every Sorrow, which won the Walt Whitman Award (selected by C. K. Williams) and also received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In 2004, Ras published an anthology of short fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others. She has been honored with residencies at The Hermitage Artist Retreat, Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, San Ysidro Ranch Writers’ Residency, and the Rockefeller Center at Bellagio. Her work has appeared in more than 100 magazines and anthologies. Ras has taught at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson, as well as at workshops nationally and internationally. Barbara Ras worked for forty years in book publishing and is the founding director emerita of Trinity University Press in San Antonio. She now lives in Denver.
Maggie Smith is the author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her latest collection of poems, Goldenrod, was released in July 2021. Smith’s poems and essays are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and elsewhere. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Public Radio International called it “the official poem of 2016.”