An Evening with Jacqueline Trimble

An Evening with Jacqueline Trimble

Wednesday, October 2nd, 6:00pm

Port Townsend Library - Carnegie Reading Room

The poet and essayist Jacqueline Allen Trimble will visit the Port Townsend Library on Wednesday, October 2, to the read from Old Enough, a collection of essays by 21 women artists and writers (including Trimble), writing about the experience of aging and the creative life. The reading will be held at 6pm, upstairs in the Carnegie Reading Room. Jacqueline Trimble will be joined by writer and painter Rikki Ducornet and painter Martha Worthley, who will also read selections from Old Enough and participate with Trimble in a conversation about the creative lives of older women artists. A Q&A will follow, led by Port Townsend Poet Laureate Conner Bouchard-Roberts.

Gay, straight, unmarried, partnered, widowed, Black, white, Latinx, retired, and still working, the writers and visual artists who’ve contributed to Old Enough are not squeamish about the challenges of growing older. But at the heart of this invigorating essay collection is a bold championing of the writers’ creative practice. Their stories are lyrical, wry, and inspiring, exploring what growing older as an artist can offer: insight, acceptance, and exhilarating new work. Old Enough aims to honor the limitless depth and scope of being old enough and offers ways to embrace purpose, meaning, and community in one’s lifelong creative journey.

Jacqueline Allen Trimble hails from Montgomery, Alabama and is a professor of English and chairs the Department of Languages and Literatures at Alabama State University. She will be visiting Port Townsend to read her new poetry book, How to Survive the Apocalypse, on Sunday September 29 as part of Poetry on the Salish Sea, at Wilderbee Farm, minutes from downtown Port Townsend. She is also teaching a day-long poetry workshop with poet Kathryn Hunt at the Imprint Bookstore on Saturday October 5. (Hurry, the workshop is filling fast!)

Jacqueline Allen Trimble is author of American Happiness, winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, and How to Survive the Apocalypse. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow in poetry, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Literary Fellow. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Louisville Review, The Offing, The Rumpus, Salvation South, and Poet Lore, and has been widely anthologized. Her nonfiction appears most recently in Old Enough, a collection of essays on aging and creativity by women artists. Trimble earned the B.A. from Huntingdon College and the M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Alabama.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event (cash only).

This event is generously sponsored by the Friends of the Port Townsend Library. Learn more about them at https://www.friendsofptlibrary.org.