Members News

RJA Member Appointed Poet Laureate of Tacoma

photo courtesy of Josie Emmons Turner

The Tacoma Arts Commission recently announced the selection of RJA member Josie Emmons Turner as the 2011-2013 Poet Laureate for the City of Tacoma. Over the next two years, Emmons Turner will participate actively in the local community by providing poetry related workshops, reading at public events, and participating in Art at Work: Tacoma Arts Month each November.

Emmons Turner’s poetry has been published in 20/20 Tacoma in Images and Verse, 2010 Floating Bridge Review Number 3, In Tahoma’s Shadow, California Quarterly, and Backstreet Review. She received her M.F.A. through the Rainier Writers Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and her B.A. from Seattle University. She has been a creative writing educator for three years, currently with Clover Park High School.

In an interview with The Weekly Volcano, Josie mentions Jeffers as one of the poets she frequently returns to. She is also featured in the Tacoma Weekly and can be found on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Josie-Emmons-Turner/162124677179856.

RJA President Reviews Volume One of Collected Letters in The Sewanee Review

The current issue of The Sewanee Review contains a review written by RJA President David J. Rothman on The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers, with Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, vol. I, 1890–1930, James Karman, ed. In “Arts and Letters: Shine, Perishing Republic of Letters,” Rothman notes that “These letters are astonishing, revealing as powerfully as any documents of the time, the gulf that opened between not only the poetries but also the sensibilities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America.” Read the review>>

Dave Mason’s Keynote Address from 2008 Published in Book of Essays

RJA member and Colorado Poet Laureate Dave Mason has a new collection of essays out, Two Minds of a Western Poet, published in the prestigious University of Michigan Poets on Poetry Series. The third essay in the book, pp. 29-41, “Some Narrative Poets of the American West,” is the keynote address Dave delivered at our meeting at Los Aptos in 2008. It is a substantial essay, and Dave also graciously acknowledges the RJA in the book’s preface. To read the essay, download it as a pdf or buy the book.