Our fall and winter reading series is hosted by Margot and Tom Lavoie.  Our featured reader will be followed by an open mic for spoken word and acoustic performance.  Signup begins at 6:45.  Participants are entered in a drawing for door prizes!  Light refreshments will be served.

Born and raised in the Great Lakes region, living now in the Pacific Northwest, Judith Arcana is a writer of poems, stories, essays and books, and a longtime scholar, teacher and activist.

Praised by writers & readers, reviewers and community leaders, Judith’s work is published in many journals, online and on paper. Her latest collections are a poetry chapbook (4th Period English), a signed/numbered edition five-poem broadside (POEMS) and a chapbook manuscript in an envelope (Family Business). These three comprise the Ash Creek Series. Her most recent full-length book is What if your mother, a collection of poems and monologues examining a constellation of motherhood themes rarely offered with such richness, including abortion, adoption, miscarriage and the contemporary biotechnology of childbirth.

She is the author of two classic prose books about motherhood, both published in the US and the UK: Our Mothers' Daughters – one of the earliest feminist analyses of the mother/daughter relationship; and Every Mother's Son – the first feminist book about the mother/son relationship published in the USA.

Judith is also the author of Grace Paley's Life Stories, A Literary Biography. Studying Grace and knowing her for many years gave Judith what she was wanting when she wrote, in that book’s Preface: “Where in literature are reflections of my experience, my sensibilities, my world view, my politics? When I read and write about John Keats, or D.H. Lawrence, or Beowulf, I am ranging far off, studying the history and possibilities of a distant ‘other.’ But when I study she-who-is-most-like-me, I learn what has been, and might be, possible for myself.”