always free, always open mic.
Mary Mackey reads.
Mary Mackey is a bestselling author who has written fourteen novels some of which have appeared on the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists. She is also the author of seven volumes of poetry including Sugar Zone winner of the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. Mackey’s novels have been translated into twelve languages including Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Greek, and Finnish. Her poems have been praised by Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, Marge Piercy, and Dennis Nurkse for their beauty, precision, originality, and extraordinary range. Garrison Keillor has featured her poetry four times on The Writer’s Almanac. Also a screenwriter, she has sold feature-length scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to independent film companies. Mackey sometimes writes comedy under her pen name “Kate Clemens.” She has a B.A. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The University of Michigan and is related through her father’s family to Mark Twain. At present, she lives in northern California with her husband Angus Wright. ” Lowenstein Associates recently published her novel The Village of Bones, a prequel to her bestselling Earthsong Series.
Kin
We were related to everybody in Crittenden County
literally everybody
judges and lawyers and county clerks
and barbers and druggists and soda jerks
and moonshiners and farmers and ferry boat captains
and the rich people in the big white houses
and the poor people down by the slough
Total strangers would come up
as soon as they saw you on the street
throw their arms around you and say
my great grandma is buried next to your great grandma
or I'm your cousin 17 times removed on your third uncle’s side
or
my my my you look just like your daddy
has he ever got out of prison?
Mary Mackey
from The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams (coming in 2018 from Marsh Hawk Press)