The 41st Salina Spring Poetry Series, sponsored and organized by Salina Arts & Humanities, begins on Tuesday, April 1, with a reading by Sam Taylor.
The reading will begin at 7 pm at Red Fern Booksellers (106 S Santa Fe Ave). Admission will be $5 and free for students with ID.
Traci Brimhall, Kansas Poet Laureate, curated this year’s series. Brimhall selected poets with a broad range of perspectives who will share their work in Salina this April.
“Sam has taught poetry for many years at Wichita State, but has also traveled the world for inspiration for his poems. That sense of being rooted and wandering far is something I feel in Sam’s poems. At the end of one I’m always astonished at how far I’m come. They move so quickly, leaping from idea to idea, connecting things I’d never seen relationships between before. Somehow the world always feels distilled and immense at the same time,” says Brimhall.
Sam Taylor is the author of three books of poems, Body of the World (Ausable Press), Nude Descending an Empire (Pitt Poetry Series), and The Book of Fools: An Essay in Memoir and Verse (Negative Capability). Ranging in theme from ecology and social justice to mysticism and eros, his poems have appeared in such journals as The New Republic, AGNI, and The Kenyon Review, and his work has been recognized with the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the Anne Halley Prize, and more than a dozen fellowship residencies. A native of Miami, he has been a wilderness caretaker in the mountains of northern New Mexico and traveled around the world, and he currently tends a wild garden in Kansas, where he is a Professor in the MFA Program at Wichita State.
For needed accommodations, please call Amanda Morris at Salina Arts & Humanities at 785-309-5770 between 8:00 am - 6:00 pm. Every effort will be made to accommodate known disabilities. For material or speech access, please call at least five working days prior to the event.