Writers Come to Fire for Artsmith Salon

Contributed by Jennifer Brennock
On Monday, Feb. 28 Artsmith celebrates writers who were awarded the 2011 Artsmith Residency. Four writers currently producing new work during their awarded week stay at Kangaroo House Bed and Breakfast will read for the Orcas community at 7 p.m.  at FIRE! Smokehouse and Grill.

Elizabeth Langemak’s work has appeared and forthcoming in journals such as Subtropics, 32 Poems, The Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, The Cincinnati Review, and Best New Poets: Fifty Poems by Emerging Writers. She currently lives in Bethany, West Virginia.

Kate Carroll de Gutes started her career as a journalist, which means that she is a stickler for the truth (capital T) and that her writing is almost always sparked by some event or thing outside herself. Her writing has been featured in the Seattle Review, New Plains Review, Raven Chronicles, Gertrude, and other journals, as well as in various anthologies, newspapers, and on the Web. She has taught in Oregon and New Mexico, as well as on a sailboat plying the waters of Puget Sound. Kate holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Anderson Center, Centrum, and the Pride Foundation. She recently completed her second book, Letter to a Young Butch.

Christina Lovin is the author of What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires.  A two-time Pushcart nominee, her writing is widely published in literary journals and anthologies.  The Southern Women Writers’ Conference awarded Lovin the 2007 Emerging Poet Award.  Lovin has served as Writer-in-Residence at Devil’s Tower National Monument, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Central Oregon, and Connemara, the North Carolina estate of the late poet, Carl Sandburg.  She has been a resident fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Footpaths House in the Azores. Her work has been generously supported on several occasions with grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council, including the 2007 Al Smith Fellowship.  Lovin makes her home in central Kentucky where she collects wool, dust, rejection letters, and unwanted dogs from the Humane Society.

Bibi Wein divides her time between the Adirondacks and Manhattan. She is the author of three books and numerous essays, profiles and short stories. Her work has appeared in Iris, Mademoiselle, Biography, Other Voices, Kalliope, Redbook, Family Circle, and many other magazines and anthologies. She is a contributing writer for Wildflower, the magazine of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, Austin Texas.  Winner of the Tupelo Press Editor’s Award for Prose, Bibi has been a fellow of The New York Foundation for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Mountain Center, and Yaddo. She is currently working on a sequel to her award-winning Adirondack memoir, The Way Home: A Wilderness Odyssey.