Poetry at the Point: Pamela Garvey, Brooking Gatewood, Karen Head

This reading will be held in-person at Focal Point, and also streamed live to this event page and to Saint Louis Poetry Center’s Facebook page. Please note the livestream can only be viewed the night of the event.

HEALTH REQUIREMENTS

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Patrons are encouraged to wear face masks when attending Poetry at the Point in-person at Focal Point. Learn more >>

ABOUT THE POETS

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Pamela Garvey is the author of the collection of poetry Seven Miles Deep (Five Oaks P, 2017). Her poetry, prose and book reviews have appeared in Esquire, Missouri Review, Margie, Spoon River Poetry Review, The North American Review and many other journals. Honors include being a semi-finalist for the “Discovery”/The Nation prize. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Things Impossible to Swallow (2River Press, 2013), and Fear (Finishing Line Press, 2008), a finalist for the New Women’s Voices Competition. Garvey is also a playwright. Her most recent production of the full length play, The Piddlings, was 2018. She is currently working on a book of lyric essays entitled Mother Matter centered on raising a son with mental illness.

Brooking Gatewood has been writing in verse since she could hold a crayon, and has a history of scheming up interactive performance experiments that bring poetry off the page and back into the body, in community – from salons and walking tours and embodied language workshops to a Tedx Talk and mixed-media collaborations. Born/raised in STL, she’s absurdly happy to be back and re-rooting in riverside soil after many years in California, and is currently pursuing her MFA with Shane Seely at UMSL. She recently won the 2022 UMSL Graduate Prize in Poetry, the 2022 Deanne Wagner Poetry Contest, and is published in Bad Ken: A Journal of Place (forthcoming).

Karen Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (a nonfiction book about issues in contemporary higher education), as well as five books of poetry: Lost on Purpose, Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year. She also co-edited the poetry anthology Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry, and has exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects, including her project “Monumental” (part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) which was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. Her poetry appears in a number of national and international journals and anthologies. In 2010 she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize. Head has held residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts-France. She has also taught in study abroad programs in Barcelona, Spain and Oxford, England. She serves as Editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review, and as secretary for the Poetry Atlanta Board of Directors. On a more unusual note, she is the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation. She is also the Poet Laureate of Fulton County, Georgia. She is a Professor at Missouri S&T.