Clark College, Tuesday, May 11th, 2010, 12:00 noon
Penguin Union Building, Room 161 ~ Free
Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of a published novel, five chapbooks, and seven full-length books of poetry. Her verse biography A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth won the 2008 Oregon Book Award for poetry. Her newest books are Six Lips (2010) and Under Taos Mountain: The Terrible Quarrel of Magpie and Tía (2009).
Penelope has worked as a home health aide, a donut maker in a cider mill, an artist’s model, and always a college professor. After many years in rural New Jersey, she moved to Portland, Oregon. She is an active member of several poetry groups– The Pearls, The Tabus, The Word Sisters, and The Cool Women Poets of New Jersey, who will be making a third trip to Oregon and reading in Portland on Thursday, May 20th. Penelope’s poetry is included on their recent CD The Cool Women Collect Themselves.
She has been awarded fellowships by the New Jersey Council on the Arts and at The Fine Arts Workcenter in Provincetown, Massachusetts, The Vermont Studio Center, and most recently at The Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. She has taught poetry workshops all over the country.
~ Praise for Penelope Scambly Schott:
On A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth
Meticulously researched, marvelously rendered, A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth is biography written with the flame of poetry. Anne Hutchinson grapples with injustice and confining religious conformity. This wonderful book is as much a parable for our own frightened and frightening times as a depiction of a period blurred by the mists of history.
—Robert Cooperman
On Six Lips:
Insightful, sure footed, possessed of an unerring ear for the music of language, Schott summons deft images from the natural world as she confronts the great themes of literature: death, love and the human experience, its duplicity and grace; this is the work of a poet writing in full stride. Praise be.—Colette Inez
On Crow Mercies:
There's a knife sharpener in California who ends his notes Stay sharp and shiny. This is what Penelope Schott does with words, images, stories, memories—sharp! shiny!—she is not afraid to startle or jolt. A reader feels electrified.—Naomi Shihab Nye
