this is a bookstore is thrilled to bring two friends for a celebration and reading of their poetry. This evening will take us on a trip to England and through time.

The Sea Was Never Far, by Marion Starling Boyer takes readers to Norfolk. Marion describes the book as “not a book of collected poems as much as it is like a novel in verse, written after I discovered a secret my grandmother kept for her whole life.”

Gail Griffin will be reading from her award-winning, and as yet-unpublished chapbook, Virginals: A Book of Elizabethan Interiors. Seven of the poems appeared in the fall 2018 issue of The Missouri Review.

Marion Starling Boyer is a professor emeritus at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. She earned her BA from Purdue University and a Masters in Communication from Western Michigan University. She is author of four poetry collections: The Sea Was Never Far (Main Street Rag, 2019), The Clock of the Long Now (Mayapple Press, 2009); Composing the Rain, winner of Grayson Books 2014 Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Green (Finishing Line Press, 2003).

After living and teaching in Kalamazoo, Michigan for many years, she has recently moved with her husband to Twinsburg, Ohio, just east of Cleveland. Marion is a member of Lit Cleveland and Lit Youngstown and leads writing workshops for both organizations.

Gail Griffin spent her first 36 years in Kalamazoo teaching at Kalamazoo College, an experience which generated two of her books: Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue, an account of coming to feminism through the classroom, and the more recent “The Events of October”: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus, which explored the murder of a K student by her ex-boyfriend in 1999. Gail’s award-winning essays and poetry have appeared widely in journals and anthologies including The Missouri Review, The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, and Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes. Forthcoming in 2020 from Wayne State U. Press is Gail’s fourth book of nonfiction, Grief’s Country: A Memoir in Pieces.​