POETRY NIGHT! Conversation and Readings with Charlene Fix and Rikki Santer!

Join two local award-winning poets, and for a night of conversation and readings. Charlene’s new poetry collection, HABITAT OF GHOSTS was released in April by Broadstone Books. Rikki Santer’s collection, COULD BE, was released in March by Sheila-Na-Gig Press.

One will be able to purchase either or both poetry collections at the event.

OHIO POETRY ASSOCIATION is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this program.

The poems in Habitat of Ghosts touch upon childhood, aging, and much in-between, haunted by memory, maturation, and loss. In the first three sections, poems converse with each other via images: of hands (caressers of the extant), of eyes (portals of perception), and of hair (correlatives of thought). In the fourth section those image clusters give way to various representations of the poet’s early and ongoing impulse to speak, write, engage with other writers, witness, heal, and honor. These final poems may even be ars poeticas, for they portray how poets are made and what poets do, which is, come to think of it, what ghosts also do in their own smoky style: breach the barriers of isolation and mortality to sing.

Charlene Fix’s previous poetry collections are Jewgirl (2023), Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat (2018), Frankenstein’s Flowers (2014), and Flowering Bruno: a Dography (2006); her prose homage/film criticism is Harpo Marx as Trickster (2013). Her poems have appeared in various literary magazines like Poetry, The New Ohio Review, Literary Imagination, and others. She has received grants from The Ohio and the Greater Columbus Arts Councils and has won two prizes from The Poetry Society of America. Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, Charlene co-coordinates Hospital Poets at the Ohio State University Medical Center and works for peace and social justice. She is a mother of three and a grandmother of two.

In Could Be, her fifteenth collection, award-winning poet Rikki Santer takes us on an eclectic journey through the challenges of motherhood, the playful ironies of pop culture, and the current conditions of our country and planet. With her signature passion for the gymnastics and surprises of language, many of these poems tether onto each other with the positivity of resilience––steadfast belief in a hopeful state of could be.

Rikki Santer’s poetry has been published widely and has received many honors, including Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, support from the Ohio Arts Council and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2023, she was named Ohio Poet of the Year, and in 2026, she will be artist-in-residence of the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio. She has had published seven full-length collections and seven chapbook sequences exploring such topics as the Hopewell earthworks of Newark, Ohio; the late Kahiki Supper Club of Columbus, Ohio; the art of ventriloquism, the complex world of fashion, and the TV series Twilight Zone. Her collection, Resurrection Letter, dedicated to surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd’s Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. Currently, Rikki serves as Artist-in-Residence at the Fran Ryan Center in Columbus, Ohio.

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