Holly Norton of Davenport, IA will serve as the resident poet at MWC throughout the fall of 2015 and will facilitate a series of events including a featured reading, area poetry workshops and school visits, hosting a community poetry reading, and curating an online poetry journal. Through the residency, Norton will encourage community-based poets who are developing their craft outside of a formal academic setting, and to provide a forum to showcase their work through the residency’s online poetry journal and a public reading of their poems.
Norton’s focus for her residency will center on the intersections of art, music, and poetry, and how these different mediums can inform and inspire each other. Many of her programs and events will address and encourage these intersections throughout the fall. MWC will also be publishing a limited-edition letterpress broadside of one of Norton’s poems, which will be available for purchase at her residency’s concluding event during the SPECTRA Reading Series event on Thursday, November 19th at Rozz-Tox in Rock Island, IL.
2015 Collins Poetry Residency Events (more dates TBA):
Tuesday, October 6th from 6:00-8:00 p.m. | YEW Teen Workshop with Holly Norton – Performance Poetry | Free & open to the public
Location: Bucktown Center for the Arts, Suite 103, 225 E. 2nd St., Davenport, IA
Saturday, November 14th from 1:00-3:00 p.m. | Community Poetry Reading hosted by Holly Norton, featuring contributors to the 2015 Community Poetry Blog | Free & open to the public
Location: Bucktown Center for the Arts, Suite 103, 225 E. 2nd St., Davenport, IA
Thursday, November 19th at 8:00 p.m. | SPECTRA Poetry Reading Series: Jennifer L. Knox, Kyle McCord + 1 more TBA, with Poet-in-Residence Holly Norton – Broadside Release | Free & open to the public
Location: Rozz-Tox (2108 3rd Ave. Rock Island, IL)
About the Collins Poetry Residency
The Collins Poetry Residency is established in honor of the Richard Collins family and their contributions to and encouragement of poets and poetry in the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities and the Upper Mississippi River Valley. The residency supports community-based poetry and a regional poet who has not yet published a full-length poetry collection and who resides in the six-county Quad City area (Rock Island, Henry, Mercer in Illinois; Scott, Clinton, and Muscatine in Iowa). The residency is coordinated by Midwest Writing Center and will take place over the fall of 2015.
The biannual Collins Poetry Residency is sponsored by 918studio of LeClaire, IA.
Bio for Holly Norton:
Holly Norton is a visual artist, creative writer, and poet. Her impetuous youth, coupled with traveling, reflect in her writing as a microscopic observation of humanity and its tendency to allow the small to influence and destroy. Her evaluation of minutia is a commentary on the unavoidable encumbrance to our human condition while giving high praise to the inane. Norton’s writing is a labyrinth of image, confession, and confrontation that often remains joyous in bleak landscapes. She lives by the Mississippi River in the Quad Cities with her three children and her head in the clouds.