Saturday, September 26, 2015

Laurel Mills visits Readers Realm in Montello, September 27

 
AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR AND POET TO VISIT READERS REALM 
 Sunday, September 27th from 1 to 3 p.m.
 
Author and winner of the Posner Poetry Award, Laurel Mills, will do a reading from her new book of poetry Hidden Seed during an appearance at Readers Realm Gallery of New and Gently-Used Books on Sunday, September 27th from 1 to 3 p.m.
 
Laurel Mills, who grew up in Maine and now lives in Wisconsin, is the author of five award-winning collections of poems, including “Rumor of Hope”, which won the Encircle Publications chapbook contest. She is also the author of three novels: “Taking Flight”, “Racing Toward Providence”, and “Undercurrents”, all from Intaglio Publications.  Her work has been published in many magazines, such as “Ms.”, “Yankee”, “Kalliope”, and “Calyx”, and in several anthologies, including “Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation”.
 
Mills holds a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in Humanities, and is Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley, where she taught English and edited the literary magazine “Fox Cry Review”.   She regularly teaches dynamic and nurturing creative writing workshops for both beginning and experienced writers of fiction or poetry. She has taught at The Clearing: A School of the Arts and Humanities; the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; The University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley; The School of the Arts at Rhinelander; Fox Valley Technical College, and many other places, where she always earns high praise from her students.
 
About her new book of poems, “Hidden Seed”, author Knute Skinner said, “Laurel Mills writes on a potentially sentimental subject, love for a developmentally disabled child. To her great credit, she succeeds brilliantly. She handles the subject forthrightly but with admirable tact, using metaphor and understatement at just the right times and allowing her sensitive observations of nature to convey much of the emotion indirectly.  In addition, she has an honest and interesting story to tell, from the moment of the daughter’s conception to the moment when the mother realizes that her daughter, now a young woman, has achieved an important measure of independence from her. The sequence of poems makes a compelling narrative, and I found it, unlike many contemporary collections of poems, impossible to put down for even a minute.”
 
Mills will be available to sign her books after the reading.  
Readers Realm Gallery of New and Gently-Used Books, Gifts and Whimsy is located in an historic church at 147 E. Montello Street in Montello.  For more information, contact Readers Realm at 608-297-2200 or readersrealm@outlook.com.