“Two Poet From Two Coasts”
Margot Farrington (New York) & Kim Shuck (Noe Valley)
A brief musical interlude by singer and high school teacher Ellen Kerr along
with her husband, guitarist-pianist, Steve Stein, will open the evening.
Margot Farrington lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Tony Martin. She began her career as a mime and an actress, then shifted to poetry.
She has taught writing at the college level and she has done numerous live performances of poetry. Among her books are:
“Rising and Falling” by Warthog Press and “Handmade Tales.”
She will read from her most recent book “Flares And Fathoms” (Bright Hill Press, 2005). A poem from this collection appears on the American
Academy of Poets website. Farrington’s poems have appeared in several anthologies; Parthian Press in the U.K. will publish five poems in
“Other Country: Contemporary Poems On Wales And Welsh-American Experience” in 2007. Farrington has read widely, and performed in
venues combining poetry with other media at museums and galleries. She has taught in settings as diverse as college and prison, and has
organized many literary events in NYC and upstate New York. Dennis Nurkse has said her work possesses “the intensity, tension, and still
momentum of a bowstring, or an arrow in the target.”
Kim Shuck is a poet, weaver, educator, doer of piles of laundry, planter of seeds, traveler and child wrangler. Her ancestors were and are
Tsalagi, Sauk and Fox and Polish, for the most part. Kim has read her work around the United States. In 2005 she toured through Jordan
with a group of poets from many countries in the interest of peace and communication. She co-curated the Spoken Word Series of the
Native American Cultural Center, and sat for a time on the board of directors for California Poets in the Schools. She received the Native
Writers of the Americas First Book Award in 2005 for her manuscript “Smuggling Cherokee” (now published by Greenfield Review Press).
Her work has appeared in various anthologies such as ‘Words Upon the Water,’ ‘Cultural Representation in Native America,’ ‘Eating Fire,
Tasting Blood: Breaking the Great Silence of the American Indian Holocaust,’ ‘Gatherings, Vol XI, Flightscape: a multi-directional collection
of Indigenous creative works,’ ‘The Other Side of the Postcard.’ She was named the Mentor of the Year by the Wordcraft Circle of Native
Writers and Storytellers in 2005, and received the Mary Tallmountain Award in 2004. She was the Featured Poet for April 2004, City Reflections:
War and Peace on Our Streets, a project of San Francisco Poet Laureate devorah major and was a California Humanities, Scholar in 1997.
“An Evening of Short Films” -- selections from The Spiritual Cinema Showcase