Poetry and Pie

A great evening combining home-made pie and readings from the works of three fine Wisconsin poets: Chris Straw, Bill Murtaugh, and Stephen Anderson. Chris Straw is best known for her singing (the Moxy Chicks) and songs written from her time in the Portage Road Songwriters Guild). Tonight’s performance will showcase the poems that have been years in the works. Bill Murtaugh is a local writer of poetry, prose, and plays. Bill has inhabited and read at many coffeehouses and poetry venues in our fair city, and has been a much loved reader at The Coffee House for decades. The poet Antler invites us to read Bill's Autumn Runs to Darkness and to "...discover secrets of survival and tenderness from one of Milwaukee's longtime lifelong poets." Stephen Anderson is a Milwaukee poet and writer whose work has appeared in Southwest Review, Latin American Literature Today, Verser Wisconsin, Amsterdam Quarterly, Verse-Virtual, Blue Heron Review and numerous other print and online journals. Many of his poems have been featured on the Milwaukee NPR affiliate WUWM Lake Effect Program. Stephen is the author of two chapbooks and four full-length poetry collections: In the Garden of Angels and Demons, The Dream Angel Plays the Cello, High Wire and On the Third Planet from the Sun: New and Selected Poems (All four from Kelsay Books). In the summer of 2013, six of his poems formed the text for a chamber music song cycle entitled The Privileged Secrets of the Arch performed by musicians from the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra and an opera singer. Stephen’s work is being archived in the Stephen Anderson Collection in the Special Collections section of Raynor Libraries at Marquette University. https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/stephen_anderson