Bill Siverly and Penelope Scambly Schott

We are delighted to welcome to poetry powerhouses back to Broadway Books: Bill Siverly and Penelope Scambly Schott.

Penelope will be reading from her new collection Waving Fly Swatters at Angels. The poems in this book embrace silliness, sensuality, and sublimity — an entire world in their wry lines. Penelope has become an enthusiastic and devoted Oregonian. She received four arts grants in New Jersey before moving to Oregon, where she joined a hiking group and received an Oregon Book Award for Poetry. She now lives in the small wheat-growing town of Dufur (pop: 635), where for several years she has led an annual poetry workshop. She and her husband host the White Dog Poetry Salon in Portland. Recent books include On Dufur Hill (2020) and Sophia and Mister Walter Whitman (2021), co-written with her equally enthusiastic and devoted dog.

Bill will be reading from his new collection Starry Night. Here is how Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita Paulann Petersen described Starry Night:  “Employing a mirrored parallelism for both individual poems and this entire collection,  Bill takes  us  on  a  journey  that  encompasses  Germany,  his childhood in Idaho, the pandemic, and the drought. Although Starry Night celebrates the balm of the natural world and the joys of a passionate marriage, the gravitas of the tone here is clear: These poems implicate us fully  in  the  destruction  we’ve  wrought  on  our  world.  His  lyric  voice  demands we acknowledge ‘how in one lifetime we’ve greased the skids / of our human demise.’” Bill has published six previous books of poems: Parzival, Phoenix Fire, The Turn, Clearwater Way, Steptoe Butte, and Nightfall. From 2002 to 2022 he was co-editor with Michael McDowell of Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place