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.
