Poetry Reading and Contest Award Announcement with Thomas Lynch

Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters (GLCL), in cooperation with The Michigan Poet, is thrilled to announce a celebratory literary event with Thomas Lynch on Saturday, April 12, at 7pm.  The event will be held at Schuler Books & Music, located on 28th Street in Grand Rapids.  The event will include a poetry reading by Lynch, as well as the public announcement of the winner of the 2014 Poetry Contest; Lynch was the final judge.  The winning poem will be published on GLCL’s website following the event, and distributed as a special broadside by The Michigan Poet; the winning poet will also receive a cash award of $100.00.

“We were thrilled to have Thomas Lynch as the final judge for our 2014 Poetry Contest,” notes Roni K. Devlin, President of GLCL.  “He is one of our favorite Great Lakes authors, and his poetry readings are always a wonderful mix of good verse, clever humor, and Irish storytelling.  This will be a great event.” 

Thomas Lynch is the author of five collections of poems and four books of essays.  A "Classic Contemporary" edition of Skating with Heather Grace, his first book of poems, has just been re-issued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press.  In 2011, Paraclete Press published The Sin Eater: A Breviary, a collection of Lynch’s sin-eater poems accompanied by black and white photographs by Michael Lynch with cover art by Sean Lynch; an Irish edition was also published in 2012.  Lynch has taught with the Department of Mortuary Science at Wayne State University in Detroit, the graduate program in writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.  He is a charter member of the faculty of the Bear River Writers Conference at Walloon Lake in Michigan.  Lynch’s essays, poems, and stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The New York Times, Times of London, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review and elsewhere.  He lives in Milford, Michigan, where he has been the funeral director since 1974, and in Moveen, Co. Clare, Ireland, where he keeps an ancestral cottage.

GLCL (www.readwritelive.org) is a literary nonprofit based in Grand Rapids with a simple mission:  to encourage, promote, and celebrate the literary endeavors of writers within the Great Lakes region.  In addition to an annual writing contest, GLCL also hosts author events and workshops, and cooperates with other organizations on special projects (for example, they will be helping the Cascade Writer’s Group with the Imagine This! An ArtPrize Anthology competition this year).

The Michigan Poet was started in 2009 with the printing of poetry broadsides and ultra-small micro-books.  While continuing to publish broadsides and poetry on the web, The Michigan Poet now also offers email newsletters, book reviews, and author events.  Inquiries can be directed to [email protected], or via The Michigan Poet’s website at www.themichiganpoet.com.

For more information about the event, or to find out more about literary activities in West Michigan, please visit GLCL’s website at www.readwritelive.org.