An Evening with Two Poets – Anna Elkins and Jacalyn McNamara

Enter a forest of poems about patience, grace, and wonder. About discovering the code of abiding life already within us. When We Become Trees cultivates the tension of becoming: rooting down while reaching up and trying to see heaven on earth—trying to find the divine even among the rocks around us. This is a book for those who, like trees, are willing to grow “ring-slow but steady.”
Anna Elkins is a poet and painter. She earned a BA in art and English, an MFA in poetry, and a Fulbright Fellowship to write in Germany. She has written, painted, and taught on six continents, exhibiting paintings and publishing books along the way, including her poetry collection, Hope of Stones, which won an Oregon Book Award. Anna now lives in a small town on a big river with her husband and many trees. For more, visit: annaelkins.com.
Painter and writer Jacalyn McNamara has worked as a freelance journalist, college writing teacher, and manager of California’s oldest art center, always attending to the poetry and music woven through the world. Her poems move through the personal, cultural, historical, and mythological, exploring thin places where spirits slip through and territories that are unstable or paradoxical. Her work has appeared in Clackamas Literary Review, Midwest Poetry Review, Jefferson Journal, and elsewhere. Most recently, she has been writing poems to accompany artist Betty LaDuke’s Turtle Wisdom exhibit.