Nevada poets featured at next LTCC Writer's Series event

Reno's first-ever poet laureate, Gailmarie Pahmeier and poet/teacher Shaun T. Griffin will be the next featured artists at the Lake Tahoe Community College's Writers Series on April 21 at 7 p.m.

The poets will read selections from their works, answer questions from the audience and sign copies of their books at the event which will take place at the college'e Roberta L. Mason Library. Their books will be available for sale.

Pahmeier, Reno’s first-ever poet laureate, has been a Nevadan for over 30 years. She teaches creative writing and contemporary literature courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she was honored with the Alan Bible Teaching Excellence Award and the University Distinguished Teacher Award. She is also on the faculty of the low residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College. Pahmeier’s work has garnered a number of awards, including a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship and two Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council. She is the author of 'The House on Breakaheart Road' and three chapbooks, the most recent of which, 'Shake It and It Snows', won the 2009 Coal Hill Chapbook Award from Autumn House Press. In 2007, she received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from Nevada. She serves as a Poet-in-Residence for Nevada and is a former National Literary Panelist for the YoungArts Foundation. A new collection of her work, 2014’s 'The Rural Lives of Nice Girls', is now in its second printing.

Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a rural social justice agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991. For more than 20 years he has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and publishes a journal of their work, 'Razor Wire'. His latest books include 'This Is What the Desert Surrenders', 'New and Selected Poems', and ;From Sorrow's Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth'. Griffin received the Rosemary McMillan Lifetime Achievement in Art Award in 2006, awarded by Sierra Arts Foundation, and the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1995. In 2014, Griffin was inducted into Nevada’s Writers Hall of Fame.

This free event is sponsored by Poets & Writers through a grant received through the James Irvine Foundation. For more information, contact LTCC Writers’ Series coordinator Dr. Suzanne Roberts at robertss@ltcc.edu.