February 15, 2012, Wednesday - Publication Reading: JoAnn Guernsey & Ethna McKiernan at the Loft

Time  7:00pm

Location: The Loft, Performance Hall, 1011 Washington Avenue South

JoAnn Guernsey has been a writer, teacher, and freelance editor for almost 35 years. She began working on Glass Asylum after receiving a McKnight Fellowship. She has written 19 fiction and nonfiction books for young readers (published primarily by Clarion Books and Lerner Publications), as well as several stories in journals and anthologies including one story selected by Susie Bright for The Best American Erotica of 1997. She also collaborated with Jim Brandenburg to write four award-winning books for children chronicling some of his adventures as a wildlife photographer and environmentalist. Glass Asylum is a novel about a troubled woman who attempts to escape reality by becoming a fiction writer and, in a sense, rewriting her life.

Ethna McKiernan has been twice awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in poetry, most recently in 2011 for the completion of  her newest book, Sky Thick With Fireflies. She has won artist residencies at Annaghmakerrig and at Centrum Port Townsend, WA. McKiernan’s first book Caravan (Dedalus Press and Midwest Villages & Voices, Minneapolis) was a Minnesota Book Award Nominee. Characterized by Booklist as a poet with “an exacting sense of metaphor,” McKiernan’s second book is The One Who Swears You Can’t Start Over (Salmon Poetry), about which the Corresponder wrote, “McKiernan is a poet’s poet, assuming one believes emotion is the beating heart of literature.”  McKiernan ran an Irish book distribution outfit (Irish Books and Media) for almost three decades and has worked the past four years for a nonprofit serving the Minneapolis homeless. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson Program for Writers.