Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest Celebrates National Poetry Month

Tuesday | April 12 | 6:30pm
Blue Heron Coffeehouse | 162 W 2nd St

The Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest will return to the tradition of celebrating National Poetry Month with a gathering to honor the sonnet. Light refreshments will be served. This event is free and open to the public. Following social time with music by Flutistry, two special guests will be featured.

Turn and Turnabout: Contemporary Sonnets will be presented by Melissa Range. From Melissa, “The sonnet is one of the most flexible of poetic forms, lending itself to all kinds of formal innovations. We will look at a handful of contemporary sonnets and talk about how contemporary poets both follow and break the rules of the sonnet, as well as how the flexibility of the sonnet affects us as readers and inspires us as writers. Time permitting, we may also do a short sonnet exercise!”

Melissa Range is the author of Scriptorium, a winner of the 2015 National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2016), and Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010). Recent poems have appeared in Ecotone, The Iowa Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares. Range is the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from East Tennessee, she teaches creative writing and American literature at Lawrence University in Wisconsin. More information about Melissa is available at melissarange.com.

Local Winona sonneteer Ken Mogren will read from his new book of humorous sonnets, Spunky Grandmas and Other Amusing Characters, which will be available in May. Retired from the insurance industry, Winona’s Sonnet Contest inspired Ken to write sonnets and now he is a published poet! Visit kenthesonnetguy.com to learn more.

Visit sonnetcontest.org to for complete details about this year’s contest.