Poetry Reading

WHEN: Sunday March 9, 2025 at 5:00 pm 

Free Admission 

ABOUT THE SHOW

Poetry at Paraguas series.

Joanne Fay Brown will read from her debut poetry collection, Independence Day (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2024). Brown was born into a family of leftists during the 1950s “McCarthy Era;" her father was blacklisted the year of her birth.  She came of age amid civil rights and countercultural movements, political assassinations and anti-war protests. Her poems reflect her experience during those historic times and her growing beyond them. Brown's poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Persimmon Tree, Evening Street Review, Peregrine, Pinesong, and Literacy North. Honors include Persimmon Tree Western States Poetry Contest Winner and Pinesong's Mary Ruffin Poole American Heritage Award. Joanne is an Amherst Writers & Artists instructor, offering a workshop — Write to Heal— for cancer patients and survivors. She lives with her husband in Santa Fe.

Robyn Hunt will read from her collection, The Fiction of Stillness. The poems evoke the author’s search for respite during breast cancer treatment and recovery. It is a “dialogue with cancer, seeking to dispel fear and offer … an understanding of stillness and healing.” Among her former lives, Hunt owned a bookstore in the Bay Area, ran printing presses, and studied creative writing at San Francisco State University. Returning 30 years ago to her native Santa Fe, she worked as a legislative reporter, and hosted literary events. Her inaugural collection of poems, The Shape of Caught Water (Red Mountain Press, 2013), was selected for an award by the New Mexico Press Women’s Association in 2014. Other writing includes a play, In Possibility: An Imaginary Correspondence, co-authored with Evangeline Brown and produced in Santa Fe by Theaterwork. She lives with her husband in Santa Fe, where she works as communications director for a nonprofit social services agency.

This project is made possible in part by New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, Santa Fe Arts and Culture and the 1% Lodger’s Tax, Santa Fe Community Foundation, and the National Latinx Theater Initiative.