Artsmith and Darvill’s Salon Series Reading coming up this Thursday

||| FROM JILL MCCABE JOHNSON for ARTSMITH |||

Ian Boyden, Margot Kahn, and Jessica Gigot are the featured readers this Thursday in the Artsmith and Darvill’s Salon Series. The reading takes place via Zoom, 5:00-6:30 pm PST.

Ian Boyden, an artist and resident of San Juan Island, is the author of A Forest of Names. After an earthquake in China killed more than 80,000 people, including more than 5,000 children in poorly constructed schools, the Chinese government forbid revealing the names of the children. Artist Ai Weiwei and citizen volunteers gathered the names, and Boyden, a scholar of Chinese letters, translated and meditated on the names, resulting in 108 name poems that serve as elegies to the children.

Jessica Gigot is a poet, farmer, teacher, and musician. She has a small farm in Bow, WA called Harmony Fields that makes artisan sheep cheese and grows organic herbs. Her poetry collections include Flood Patterns and, most recently, Feeding Hour. Gigot has lived in the Skagit Valley for over fifteen years and is deeply connected to the artistic and agricultural communities that coexist in this region.

Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck, which received the 2009 High Plains Book Award for First Book. With Kelly McMasters, she is co-editor of the New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home; their new collection, Wanting, is forthcoming from Catapult Books.

Learn more about the reading at http://orcasartsmith.org/salon-series.html.