Open Books, one of two all-poetry bookstores in the U.S. (The only one west of Cambridge, MA.)

Three important upcoming readings:

BRENDA HILLMAN

Brenda Hillman reads from Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press), the third volume, following Cascadia and Pieces of Air in the Epic, in her series of meditations on the elements. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and, with Patricia Dienstfrey, the editor of The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. She is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry at Saint Mary’s College and works with CodePink, a social justice organization against war. Ms. Hillman received the William Carlos Williams Award for Pieces of Air in the Epic.

THOMAS PRUIKSMA

Thomas Pruiksma joins us to present Give, Eat, and Live: Poems of Avvaiyar (to be published in November by Red Hen Press), a bilingual selection of poems he translated from the work of the 12th century Tamil poet Avvaiyar, considered one of the most important female poets in Tamil’s 2500-year literary history, and one of the best known of either gender. He will read the poems both in English and in Tamil. A resident of Vashon Island, his other books include A Feast for the Tongue: Forty Servings of Spoken Tamil with Helpings of Equally Spoken English, co-authored with Dr. K.V. Ramakoti, and The Body and the Earth: Notes from a Conversation, with the artist C.F. John.

MAGED ZAHER

Maged Zaher joins us to read from Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer, published by Pressed Wafer. A resident of Seattle, he was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned an M.Sc. degree in structural engineering, specializing in computer aided design. In 1995, he led the team that did the analysis of the seismic effect on the Meridian high rise hotel in Giza, Egypt. In 1998 he earned a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Akron, Ohio. He has worked at many large software companies, and participated in building products such as AutoCad, Hotmail, Windows Presentation Foundations, and Microsoft Student. His main areas of interest are API (Application Programming Interface) design and building scalable and flexible SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) systems. His collaboration with Pam Brown, Farout Library Software, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007.