Louise Morgan Runyon and Cecilia Woloch will give readings of their poetry highlighting
labor and social justice issues on Friday, November
22, at 6 p.m. at City Lights Books, 3 E. Jackson St., Sylva, NC. This reading celebrates the release of
Woloch’s new chapbook, Labor: The Testimony of Ted Gall.
Ted
Gall was a coal miner and union organizer in Western
Pennsylvania in the first half of the 20th century. Woloch’s new book traces Gall’s experiences in
the mines and the union, and the confluence of the labor movement with the ongoing,
developing movement for black liberation. Says poet Joy Priest, “This poem, composed
almost entirely in words written by Gall himself, gives a first-hand account of
what it was like in the mines, in the unions, and in the spirits of the working
poor, ‘lifting their voices like trumpets’…an important contribution to
Appalachian ‘docupoetics’ and cross-racial labor solidarity.”
Cecilia Woloch is the granddaughter of a
coal miner and grew up in rural Kentucky.
She is an award-winning poet with fellowships from the National
Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, and is the author of seven
books of poetry. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha
Tretheway describes Woloch as "...a poet who is passionately alive in this
world.” She has traveled the
world extensively as a teacher and writer.
Her book Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem has had multi-lingual,
multi-media performances in Los Angeles, Paris, Warsaw, Athens and elsewhere. ceciliawoloch.squarespace.com.
Louise
Morgan Runyon is a poet with deep roots in Western North Carolina. A former steelworker and labor activist, she
is also a dancer, choreographer, and Artistic Director of Louise Runyon
Performance Company. She has published
five books of poems and has “a gift for connecting
generations… and bridging gaps divided by race, language, and culture,” per
writer Kendall Klym. Runyon facilitates
Mountain Word Writers’ Group at City Lights, and all of her books are available
there. louiserunyonperformance.com.
Woloch will offer a
workshop for local writers called Our Lives Which Can Never Run Dry: Workshop
for Writers in Short-Form Prose & Poetry. The
workshop will be held on Thursday, November 21 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., St. David's
Episcopal Church, Cullowhee. Contact sylvawriters@gmail.com for more information, or if interested
in joining Mountain Word Writers’ Group.
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