Staff report

PIQUA — Community members are invited to Edison State Community College’s Piqua Campus on Friday, May 6, at 2 p.m. in Room 456 for a creative writing event with established authors and those just beginning to explore their talents. Members of the Edison State Creative Writing Club and former students in Dr. Vivian Blevins’ college creative writing classes will read their work and have the opportunity to dialogue with established authors. Retired Edison State professor Cathy Essinger and current faculty member Debra Williamson will be featured.

Essinger, 2005 Ohio Poet of the Year, has published five books of poetry: A Desk in the Elephant House, My Dog Does Not Read Plato, What I Know About Innocence, The Apricot and the Moon, and Wings, or Does the Caterpillar Dream of Flight? She is featured in anthologies and is regularly published in journals such as Southern Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West. She will coach the group on what, in addition to talent, it takes to get published.

Williamson spent the first decades of her adult life working in New York City’s financial services sector before moving to Yellow Springs and beginning teaching at Edison State 12 years ago. A member of a Yellow Springs poetry group, she indicates that she lost her eldest son to suicide more than a decade ago, and that loss has taught her “more about listening.” In the session on Friday, she will be reading a poem she wrote two weeks ago about her son and his bass guitar. She is currently working on a memoir and indicates that she is “striving to be present to her unfolding life.” She was most recently published in Mock Turtle and Excursions.

Students who will be reading include Rebecca Spenser (selected to read as one of 12 poets as a part of Mosaic scheduled at the Troy-Hayner Cultural Center on June 11, 2022), Grace Davis, Floyd Lockhart, August Evans, and others.

Blevins says, “I believe in the power of words to connect writers with readers as we struggle with our challenges and celebrate our joys.”