Trevino Brings Plenty & Kelly Terwilliger – 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.

The November reading will be curated by Frances Payne Adler.

Trevino Brings Plenty is a poet and musician who lives, works, and writes in Portland, OR. He is singer/songwriter/guitarist for the musical ensemble Ballads of Larry Drake. He has read/performed his work at poetry festivals as far away as Amman, Jordan and close to his home base at Portland’s Wordstock Festival. In college, Trevino worked with Primus St. John and Henry Carlile for this poetry work, studied with Tomas Svoboda for music composition, and Jerry Hahn for Jazz guitar. Trevino is an American and Native American; a Lakota Indian born on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, South Dakota, USA. Some of his work explores the American Indian identity in American culture and how it has through genealogical history affected indigenous peoples in the 21st century. He writes of urban Indian life; it’s his subject. Titles: Wakpá Wanáǧi, Ghost River (2015); Real Indian Junk Jewelry (2012); Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (2008).

Kelly Terwilliger is a poet and storyteller from Eugene, Oregon. Every week she tells hours and hours of stories to kids and every week she reminds herself that empathy is an act of imagination, and that imagination is nurtured by language, and that stories and poems will help us stay alive to ourselves and one another. She is presently working on a vending machine intended to promote imaginative fun while also raising money for local causes. She also tries, whenever she can, to stay active in her private campaign as a writer of cheer letters, feeling, as she does, that most people are rarely appreciated enough for the good they do in the world. Her poems lately have been gravitating around time, and its layers, and how we can experience a multiplicity of times–and perspectives–at once. This too, might well by an avenue toward empathy. We, who are temporary, listening to the past and the present and the future. Kelly’s chapbook, A Glimpse of Oranges, was published by Finishing Line Press, and her latest full-length collection, Riddle Fish Hook Thorn Key, by Airlie Press. Her poems have appeared in various journals including december Magazine, Hubbub, Comstock Review, and Prairie Schooner.