Shirley Brewer and Betsy Boyd, GODDESS OF SWIZZLE

We're launching Shirley Brewer's latest poetry collection, and you're invited! Her 5th collection of poems, Goddess of Swizzle comes to us from Baltimore's own Apprentice House Press, and reflects Shirley Brewer's signature vibrancy in the Baltimore literary community. It invites the reader to "a feast for here and now" through evocative, sensuous poetic worlds that encourage us to reflect on themes of love, loss, family, community, and culture.

Betsy Boyd, Director of the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore, will read alongside Shirley Brewer at this event.

We hope you'll join us in celebration!

Order GODDESS OF SWIZZLE here!

Shirley J. Brewer graduated from careers in bartending, palm-reading and speech therapy. She is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. Shirley serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts in Baltimore, and on the board of Passager Books, a nonprofit, independent publisher whose mission is to publish and present the work of older writers. Her award-winning poems garnish Smartish Pace, Poetry East, Slant, Gargoyle, Chiron Review, The Comstock Review, and many other journals/anthologies. Shirley’s books include: A Little Breast Music (Passager, 2008), After Words, (Apprentice House Press, 2013), Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag, 2017), Wild Girls (Apprentice House Press, 2023).

Nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, Shirley was a 2020 guest on The Poet and The Poem with Grace Cavalieri, former Maryland poet laureate, broadcast from the Library of Congress, where Shirley’s poems are now archived and – as part of the Lunar Codex program - are currently on the moon! Her lifetime of poetic research includes (brief but memorable) conversations with Al Pacino, Bette Midler, Richard Chamberlain, and Robin Williams. Shirley received the first-ever Creativity Award from the University of Baltimore, where she earned her MA in Creative Writing/Publishing Arts. Her personal definition: I Am Shimmering Goddess Energy. Website: shirleyjbrewer.com

Betsy Boyd’s fiction has been published in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Five Points, StoryQuarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Her short story “Scarecrow” received a Pushcart Prize. Betsy directs the Creative Writing and Publishing Arts MFA program at the University of Baltimore and is the recipient of two Maryland State Arts Council awards, an Elliot Coleman Writing Fellowship, a James A. Michener Fellowship and residencies through Fundación Valparaíso, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

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