Windfall
The Windfall reading series is sponsored and produced in collaboration by the Lane Literary Guild, the Eugene Public Library, Friend of Eugene Public Library, and the Eugene Public Library Foundation. Readings are monthly from September until May, and are free and open to everyone.
2023 Windfall Series
Tuesday, March 16, 2021
Link to event: YouTube
Amber Flame
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, whose work has garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, The Watering Hole, Vermont Studio Center, and YEFE NOF. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame’s work has been published in diverse arenas, including Def Jam Poetry, Nailed Magazine, Winter Tangerine, The Dialogist, Split This Rock, Black Heart Magazine, Sundress Publications, FreezeRay, Redivider Journal and more. In her writing, Flame explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all. A 2016 and 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, and Jack Straw Writer Program alum, Amber Flame's first full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame was a recipient of the CityArtist grant from Seattle's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to write, produce and perform her one-person play, Hands Above the Covers, a series of character monologues drawn from diverse real-life interviews. In early 2018, Flame co-curated the art installation Black Imagination at Core Gallery in Seattle. She had her first solo exhibit in 2019 with a project entitled ::intrigue:: 8, a multimedia installation that featured musical compositions inspired by the text of 8 different poets with original video content as well as text from the original poems, through Jack Straw Production's Artist Support and New Media Gallery fellowships. Hugo House's 2017-2019 Writer-in-Residence for Poetry, Flame’s second book of poetry, titled apocrifa, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Recently named Program Director of Hedgebrook, she continues to work as a writing instructor and serves to offer programming for currently and formerly incarcerated women and youth through her work with The IF Project while working on a third collection, remounting her full-length play, working on a few nonfiction anthologies, and raising her daughter. Amber Flame is a queer Black mama just one magic trick away from growing her unicorn horn.
Mike van Mantgem
Mike van Mantgem is preacher’s kid from small-town Iowa and a long-time resident of Eugene, Oregon. He is an editor to the book trade and works with independent publishers and commercial houses like W. W. Norton and Hachette. His fiction has appeared in everything from literary magazines to NPR.
Mike will be reading from a recently completed novel called The Advance-Man. Set in the farm country of eastern Iowa, it tells the tale of a smooth-talking confidence man who gets sidetracked by love. Infused with humor, romance, and a touch of larceny, The Advance-Man is like Paper Moon or The Music Man updated for the modern era.
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Erica Goss served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA from 2013-2016. In 2019, she won the Zocalo Poetry Prize. She is the author of Night Court, winner of the 2016 Lyrebird Award, Wild Place, and Vibrant Words: Ideas and Inspirations for Poets. Recent work appears in Lake Effect, Atticus Review, Contrary, Convergence, Spillway, Cider Press Review, Eclectica, The Tishman Review, Tinderbox, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Main Street Rag, among others. She is the founder of Girls’ Voices Matter, an arts education program for teen girls. Erica is the editor of Sticks & Stones, a monthly poetry newsletter. Please visit her at www.ericagoss.com.
Karen McPherson (she/her/hers) is Professor Emerita of Francophone literature at the University of Oregon. She is the author of the poetry collection Skein of Light (Airlie Press, 2014) and of the 2012 chapbook Sketching Elise. Her work has appeared in many literary journals including Beloit Poetry Journal, Descant, The Cincinnati Review, Comstock Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Zoland, California Quarterly, and Potomac Review. She has received several nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Between 2013 and 2017, Karen worked as an editor in the Airlie Press poetry collective. She was co-coordinator of the Lane Literary Guild’s Windfall reading series in 2016-2018.
Since her retirement, Karen has translated the work of several contemporary Québec women writers. One of the most personally rewarding and ongoing collaborations is with Québec poet Louise Dupré, whose work has twice been awarded Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry. Dupré recently translated a number of Karen’s poems into French (six of these translations now published in Mïtra: Revue d’art et de littérature) and Karen is currently completing a translation into English of Dupré’s poetry volume Tout près [Right Up Close].
Among Karen’s current writing projects are a chapbook of “punctuation” poems called Punctum and a full-length poetry manuscript called Trebles, Blooms. Karen’s poems often explore landscapes of memory and imagination with particular attention to how language and loss permeate and resist one another. The poems in Trebles, Blooms continue to reflect these preoccupations even as they engage more directly and deeply with the experience of aging and the changing contours of the self over time. Karen lives in Eugene, Oregon with her wife Elise.