Four poets to visit Kendall Neighborhood Library

Poet Alan Ainsworths

The Houston Public Library (HPL) will host a free poetry reading on Saturday, Aug. 2.  

The event will feature four poets and a guest poet. After the presentation, the audience will have an opportunity to meet them and get signed copies of their books. Among the poets featured will be Alan Ainsworths, Joseph Campana, Sarah Cortez, Jeannie Gambills and Van G. Garretts.

Ainsworths’s poetry and prose have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The American Book Review, The New England Review, ArtLies, Mutabilis Press and other journals. He teaches in the English Department of Houston Community College-Central.

Campana is a poet, arts reviewer and scholar of Renaissance literature. He is the author of The Book of Faces, with poems in Slate, Conjunctions, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Poetry and many other venues. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Houston Arts Alliance, and teaches literature and creative writing at Rice University.

Gambills's poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Cenizo, The Weight of Addition: An Anthology of Texas Poetry and the Texas Poetry Calendar 2011. Her poetry will also be in the upcoming Texas Poetry Calendar 2012. She has been a finalist in the Ruth G. Hardman/Nimrod Poetry Competition.

Garretts’s poetry has been published in journals and anthologies in the United States, Africa, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. His collection of poetry is entitled Songs in Blue Negritude. His second collection, ZURI: Love Songs will be published by Cap & Sneakers Studios and available on eBooks this summer.

This program is free and open to the public.

The event will take place at 2 p.m. at the Kendall Neighborhood Library, located at 609 N. Eldridge.

For more information, visit www.houstonlibrary.org or www.PublicPoetry.net.