The Writer’s Center welcomes Pat Valdata (Where No Man Can Touch) and Shirley J. Brewer (Wild Girls) for a reading and discussion to celebrate their new poetry collections. Book signing to follow.
Free and open to the public, limited space, registration required below.
Pat Valdata is a poet and novelist. Her book about women aviation pioneers, Where No Man Can Touch, won the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize and was published in a revised edition from Wind Canyon Books in 2023. Her other poetry books, Inherent Vice and Looking for Bivalve, are sadly out of print. Her poetry has appeared in Ecotone, Ekphrastic Review, Italian Americana, Little Patuxent Review, North American Review, Passager, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. patvaldata.com
Shirley J. Brewer is a poet, educator and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology in Baltimore, MD, and teaches creative writing workshops to all ages. Recent poems garnish journals Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, Gargoyle, Poetry East, Slant, Tar River Poetry among others, and anthologies, such as Nasty Women Poets, An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Shirley’s poetry books include A Little Breast Music, Passager Books, After Words, Apprentice House, and Bistro in Another Realm, Main Street Rag. Wild Girls, her fourth poetry collection, was published by Apprentice House in June, 2023. Shirley was awarded the first Creativity Award for Excellence in Plorking (Play + Work) from the University of Baltimore, where she earned her Master’s degree in Creative Writing/Publishing Arts in 2005. A Pushcart nominee, Shirley was interviewed in January, 2020 at the Library of Congress by Maryland poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri, for her long-running series “The Poet and the Poem.”About the Books
Where No Man Can Touch is a collection of persona poems in the voices of women aviation pioneers, who once were famous but now have been mostly forgotten. Winner of the 2015 Donald Justice Poetry Prize, the book is back in print in a revised edition containing new poems. Competition judge Dick Davis said of the book, “In poetic forms as varied, and often as witty, as their subjects, Pat Valdata celebrates her airborne heroines with gusto, delight, and an exuberant sense of the sheer fun of the enterprise.” Valdata’s book is available on Amazon and from the publisher at Wind Canyon Books.