Poet Laureate to read to Wallingford children this Sunday

Former Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen will be the guest reader this Sunday at Open Books: A Poem Emporium. She will read for children young and old as part of the monthly Winnie-the-Pooh Reading Series at Wallingford’s only all-poetry bookstore. The event will be 11-11:45 a.m. at 2414 North 45th St.

Elizabeth Austen‘s collection Every Dress a Decision (Blue Begonia Press, 2011) was a finalist for the 2012 Washington State Book Award in poetry. She is also the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Girl Who Goes Alone (Floating Bridge Press, 2010) and Where Currents Meet, winner of the Toadlily Press Chapbook Award and part of the quartet Sightline, published in 2010.

Austen’s poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac and online at Verse Daily, The Bellingham Review and DMQ Review.  You’ll find her poems in anthologies including What to Read in the Rain and Poets Against the War.

She’s performed at such venues as Poets House in New York City, The Loft in Minneapolis, the Austin ArtSpark Festival, and locally at the Richard Hugo House Literary Series, Bumbershoot, and the Seattle and Skagit River Poetry Festivals. An audio CD, skin prayers, featuring 26 original poems recorded with a live audience in the KUOW studios, is available on her website, www.elizabethausten.org.