Cheer on your friends and neighbors as they read poetry they’ve written this summer! On Monday July 25 at 6pm, participants who have been in a Creative Aging poetry writing series with Nevada Poet Laureate Gailmarie Pahmeier will read from work generated in their month-long workshop experience.
Please bring a lawn chair for the event, which will take place on the Silver City Park stage (if there is inclement weather, the event will be held inside the nearby Schoolhouse/community center). Stay for light refreshments after the reading.
Support: The activity is made possible by a grant provided by the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies in partnership with E.A. Michelson Philanthropy, and supported in part by the Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from Healthy Communities Coalition of Lyon and Storey Counties and the Silver City Volunteer Library.
About the summer workshop:
Nevada Poet Laureate Gailmarie Pahmeier led the summer workshop for adults 55+. She explains that “in this workshop, we’ll discuss and write about what makes us Nevadan, how we got here and why we stay, and why our individual voices make this place so very rich. We’ll study the art of narrative, of storytelling, by focusing primarily on poetry, traditional forms and the prose poem. We’ll address metaphor, musicality, how lines move down the page toward meaning…As a community of Nevadans, our thematic focus will be on where we live and how we live: how can we tell our stories so that they resonate with others, particularly those who are unlike us.”
About Gailmarie Pahmeier:
Gailmarie Pahmeier, a widely published author and Professor Emerita of the University of Nevada, Reno, was named Nevada Poet Laureate and appointed to serve a two-year term beginning September 2021 and concluding August 2023.
A 2016 inductee in the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, Pahmeier has published three full-length works of poetry, The Rural Lives of Nice Girls, The House on Breakaheart Road, and Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints: A Nevada Gospel, as well as three chapbooks. Her chapbook Shake It and It Snows won the Coal Hill Chapbook Award from Autumn House Press. Her work has been included in literary journals Booth, Spillway and Descant, among others.
Pahmeier taught creative writing and contemporary literature at UNR, where she received the University Distinguished Teacher Award and the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award, among other distinctions. She is currently on the faculty of the low residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada University.
She is the recipient of three Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council, including the prestigious Major Project Fellowship.
Pahmeier received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, served as Reno’s first Poet Laureate, and in 2017 was recognized by Nevada Humanities as an Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities.
The Nevada Poet Laureate enriches the lives of residents by sharing and promoting poetry through public appearances, readings, workshops, and digital and social media. The Nevada State Poet Laureate is a Governor appointed position, managed by the Nevada Arts Council which oversees the Poet Laureate selection process and submits qualified individuals to the Governor for final review and appointment. The role of the Poet Laureate is to propagate the art of poetry and encourage literacy and learning throughout the state.
