An Evening with Pauletta Hansel & Rita Sims Quillen

517 Union Avenue,Knoxville TN 37902

18 October, 2022

Description

Union Ave Books is proud to bring you an evening of poetry with Pauletta Hansel and Rita Sims Quillen. This event will take in our store on October 18th at 6:30 PM. Pauletta Hansel’s nine poetry collections include Heartbreak Tree, a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia, published in 2022 by Madville Publishing, and Friend, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for Appalachian poetry, all from Dos Madres Press. She is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel. Her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Pauletta was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate and is 2022 Writer-in-Residence for The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County. Heartbreak Tree is a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia, moving from girlhood into maturity, following the throughline of poetic truth-telling, the necessity of serving as witness to both the self and the region. “There is a road, but the road is still inside you,” the mature Hansel tells the girl she was, encouraging her: “You are trying. Remember.” This book does the work of that remembering, honoring the responsibility of the poet to speak the forbidden stories of her own and other women’s lives. Poet and reviewer Richard Hague has called the book, “a memoir in verse, an autobiography in moments, a poetic essay by a self recovering and assembling itself from fragments.” Poet and reviewer Sara Moore Wagner writes, “Heartbreak Tree is a book about personal history, women’s history, regional history, but it’s also very much in the present with poems about the pandemic, about the Trump presidency, and about a woman now looking back on a voice she lost… [building] to a deeper understanding of the truth, of the region, and of the self.” Rita Quillen’s novel Wayland, a sequel to Hiding Ezra, was published by Iris Press (2019). Her full-length poetry collection, The Mad Farmer’s Wife, was published in 2016 by Texas Review Press, and was a finalist for the Weatherford Award in Appalachian Literature from Berea College. Her novel Hiding Ezra, released by Little Creek Books, was a finalist for the 2005 DANA Awards. One of six semi-finalists for the 2012-14 Poet Laureate of Virginia, she received three Pushcart nominations, and a Best of the Net nomination in 2012. Her latest poetry collection from Madville Press, Some Notes You Hold: New and Selected Poems, is about surviving what life throws at us as we age. The so-called “golden years” are so named because of the high admission price—the tremendous losses, disappointments, illnesses, and failures we all experience if we live long enough. The first part of the book, called “Letting Go,” focuses on surviving deep grief. The middle section is a musical interlude, exploring the tremendous power of music to heal us mentally, physically, and spiritually and to reorder our thinking and our emotions. The last section, “Holding On,” explores the roads leading to survival: prayer and meditation, communion with the natural world, and writing. The price paid for those “golden years” leads to the prize: insight, joy, and a kind of peace we were incapable of when we were young.