Please join us in The Daily Grind as we celebrate National Poetry Month with an event featuring four local poets reading from their work.

Featured poets:

MaryAnn Moenck – MaryAnn Moenck’s poetry chapbook, Bees in the Attic, will be published this spring by Finishing Line Press. She attended Write-by-the-Lake Writer’s Workshop & Retreat in 2011 and worked with Angela Rydell on her poetry. MaryAnn credits the workshop with enriching her skills and enabling her to see her poems through the reader’s eyes. She was selected to participate in the 2012-2013 Mentor Series at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Jennifer Willoughby – Incantatory, intimate, and incendiary, the poems of this award-winning debut are filled with explosive wit and humor like a knife you don t see coming. A kaleidoscopic intelligence flows through “Beautiful Zero,” embracing forms of culture high and low in effort to finding meaning in the chaos. Poems about Shark Week and college football sit beside Roman Polanski and biting critiques of modern war. A series of poems set in a Kaiser Permanente hospital tear into the world of privatized health care while simultaneously charting a story of love in the face of catastrophe. Yet even at her most surreal, Willoughby always finds the pulsing heart at the core of the poem. She embraces what she cannot understand about both the world and herself because after all, Nothing is as random as they say it is. / You were born the weirdo that you are. 

Katrina Vandenberg –  In her accomplished second collection of poems, Katrina Vandenberg writes from the intersection of power and forgiveness. With poems named for letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and employing such innovative forms as the ancient ghazal, Vandenberg deciphers the seemingly indecipherable in this extraordinary becoming of self through language. Moving between the physical and the abstract, the individual and the collective, “Alphabet Not Unlike the World” unearths meaning–with astonishing beauty–from the pain of loss and separation.

Mark Berriman – After living in Atlanta, New York City and Milwaukee, Mark Berriman has called Minnesota his home for the past 20 years. He is a published author, a poet and artist, musician and active community leader. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, his work is influenced by global events as well as post-modern culture. Mark’s first book, “Scar Lit” (2003), was written under the name Mark Edward Marston. He took a ten year break from writing poetry and then returned with the soap box stomping trilogy – “Brutally Frank” (2012), “Kink in the Chain” (2013), and “That Turned Ugly Fast” (2015). Mark has been a guest on many television and radio programs including The Bob Utecht Show, Meet the Author and The Mischke Broadcast. His work has appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Star Tribune, and numerous regional and national periodicals.