The Voice of Empathy: Laura Winter and John Witte – reading and Q&A

The Voice of Empathy is back for season 2 at thetinytheaterPDX, 3306 SE 65th Ave, Portland, OR. Please spread out the parking around the neighborhood to avoid congestion.

The series showcases poets whose work investigates the human capacity for compassion and generosity and invites the reader/listener to care deeply for others and the world. This description is for the poets’ reference only and does not presume to impose any constraints on the work selected for presentation.

There is room for 37-39 poetry lovers. Please come a few minutes in advance to reserve your seats. In case of snow, please monitor this event for possible rescheduling.

Laura Winter lives in Portland Oregon. Author of 6 collections, broadsides and performance projects, her book Coming Here to be Alone presents her poems in both English and German. Improvised music is an influential factor in how Laura considers the use of the page and language. She performs with musicians using language as an instrument. Winter’s US-Mexico borderlands collaboration with photographer Terri Warpinski, Liminal Matter: Fences and Liminal Matter: Traces is in numerous special collections such as Stanford University Library, Amherst College and Yale University. Winter occasionally publishes TAKE OUT, a bag-a-zine featuring visual art, writing and music.

John Witte grew up in New England, the son of Polish immigrants. After college he worked for many years as a carpenter before moving west to Oregon. Since then his poems have appeared widely, in publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review, and been included in The Norton Introduction to Literature, among other anthologies. His poems have been translated, set to music, and recorded for the blind. He is the author of Loving the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 1978), The Hurtling (Orchises Press, 2005), Second Nature (University of Washington Press, 2008), and Disquiet (University of Washington Press, 2015). For thirty years he was the editor of Northwest Review, as well as numerous books, including The Collected Poems of Hazel Hall (Oregon State University Press, 2000). The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches Ecopoetry and other classes at the University of Oregon in Eugene, where he lives on the outskirts of town with his family, goats and chickens.