Tonight's edition of Talking Earth features Leanne Grabel, C. E. Putnam, and Rebecca Smolen. Host dan raphael will read poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Tongo Eisen-Martin.
Leanne Grabel is a writer, illustrator, performer & retired special education teacher. Grabel teaches graphic flash memoir throughout the Pacific Northwest. In love with mixing genres, she has written & produced numerous spoken-word multi-media shows, including “The Lighter Side of Chronic Depression”; and “Anger: The Musical.” Her poetry books include Lonesome & Very Quarrelsome Heroes; Short Poems by a Short Person; Badgirls (a collection of flash non-fiction & a theater piece); & Gold Shoes, a collection of graphic prose poems. She is currently illustrating a novel for filmmaker/writer Penny Allen. She and her husband Steve Sander are the founders of Café Lena, a Portland poetry hub of the 90s. Grabel is the 2020 recipient of the Bread and Roses Award for longtime contributions to women's literature in the Pacific Northwest.
C.E. Putnam is the author of The Papier-Mâché Taj Mahal, XX Elegies, Spaces Where Spaces Are, Transmissions from the Institute, Maniac Box, Things Keep Happening, Crawlspace (w/ Daniel Comiskey), and the chapbook “The Bunny Manuscript: Episode Three” (Textile Series).
His sound works include P.I.S.O.R. SCARES, a series of mind-melting Halloween themed sound collages, and an ambient-drone work, “Music for Plants and other living things.”
He is the founder of the Putnam Institute for Space Opera Research (P.I.S.O.R.) and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Rebecca Smolen is a writer based in Portland, transplanted from New Hampton in 2014 and is a mom of two adorable little gingers. She grew up on a dead-end road exploring drainage pipes and pond life and has a degree in creative writing and philosophy. Rebecca has been trained and is certified to lead writing classes in the Gateless Method. This method was scientifically created to avoid provoking the fight or flight reaction generating a safe place to produce raw, new writing that will spotlight the strongest talents of that material. You can find her poetry most recently in Allegory Ridge, Feminine Collective, Tiny Seed, The Inflectionist Review, Poeming Pigeon, and her collections Womanhood, and Other Scars and Excoriation, published by The Poetry Box.
- KBOO