Kim Stafford celebrates new poetry book

Poet Kim Stafford will celebrate the release of his new book "As The Sky Begins to Change" at Paulina Springs Books on Thursday, July 18, at 6:30 p.m. Stafford will be joined by local singer-songwriter/poet Beth Wood, who will share an original song inspired by Stafford's new work.

"As the Sky Begins to Change" is a book of poems to wake the world, lyric anthems for earth and kin.

Photo by Rob Reynolds

Kim Stafford is launching a new book of poems at Paulina Springs Books.

In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter's gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.

Founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, Stafford teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018, he was named Oregon's ninth Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term. His call to writers everywhere: "In our time is a great thing not yet done. It is the marriage of Woody Guthrie's gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs, poems, blessings, manifestos, and rants by those with voice for those with need."

At Paulina Springs Books is located at 252 W. Hood Ave.