Karina Author, Book, Event

The Red Wheelbarrow: Dawn Garisch

Dawn Garisch will be the featured poet at The Red Wheelbarrow next week.

Dawn Garisch is an award-winning author and poet, a medical doctor and founding member of the Life Righting Collective. As an LRC facilitator, she teaches writing and poetry as a route to self-discovery, self-recovery and community building. Her second collection, Disturbance, (Karavan Press) came out in 2020.

Broken

A toy horse falls from the shelf, breaks a leg.
The small boy, tearful, shows an uncle 
who gives him a tube of glue:
The boy tries hard like he always does, 
not knowing how to fix 
his parent’s domestic mess. 

The horse leg sets, stuck back skew, 
now it’s lame, he’s made things worse. 
His father’s long gone, but he’s to blame, 
the glue of family rendered useless. 

The boy wanders out of the house, 
climbs the tree, sits by himself, sick
with crying. Wanting his father 
joined to his mother, wanting 
the father to come home to help him. 

What he wants is impossible, so he prays
for the leg to be restored like magic, 
so he can ride away.

— Dawn Garisch

As always, the reading by the featured poet will be followed by an open mic session for poets from the audience. Poets are welcome to read from their own work as well as from the work of a favourite poet.

Join Zoom Meeting: Dawn Garisch at The Red Wheelbarrow
Date: 18th August 2022
Time: 19:30 SAST

Meeting ID: 952 904 1131
Passcode: 12345

Karina Author, Book

Melissa Sussens to publish her debut collection of poetry with Karavan Press

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Melissa Sussens will be publishing her superbly crafted debut poetry collection, Slaughterhouse, with Karavan Press later this year. I have been reading Melissa’s poetry across literary magazines and the web for about two years now and it has always moved and inspired me. It will be a joy to share it with readers in book form. Poetry lovers are in for a true literary treat!

Melissa Sussens is a queer veterinarian and poet. Her work has appeared in Stanzas Poetry Magazine, SFWP Quarterly and Isele Magazine, among many others. She has performed at the Poetry In McGregor festival, Off The Wall and The Red Wheelbarrow where she also hosts poetry readings. Melissa placed 2nd in the New Contrast National Poetry Prize and was amongst the winners of the ClemenGold Writing Competition in 2020. She was selected for the Poetry for Human Rights anthology, Between the Silence, in 2021 and has been nominated for Best of the Net. By day she works as a small animal veterinarian and whenever she’s not doctoring animals, she can be found immersed in writing, editing, or reading poems. Melissa lives in Cape Town with her fiancée and their two dogs. Find her on Instagram and Twitter @melissasussens.

Karina Author, Book, Event

Stephen Symons will be reading at The Red Wheelbarrow on Thursday, 20th January, at 19:30

Stephen Symons will be The Red Wheelbarrow’s featured poet this week.

Stephen Symons has published poetry and short-fiction in journals, magazines and anthologies, locally and internationally. His debut collection, Questions for the Sea (uHlanga, 2016) received an honourable mention for the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and was also shortlisted for the 2017 Ingrid Jonker Prize. His unpublished collection Spioenkop was a semi-finalist for the Hudson Prize for Poetry (USA) in 2015. Landscapes of Light and Loss (Dryad Press) was published in 2018, and For Everything That Is Pointless and Perfect (Karavan Press) in 2020. Small Souls, a collection of selected and new poems will be published in 2022 by Karavan Press.

Symons holds a PhD in History (University of Pretoria) and an MA in Creative Writing (University of Cape Town). He lives with his family in Oranjezicht, Cape Town.

**As always, the reading by the featured poet will be followed by an open mic session for poets from the audience. Poets are welcome to read from their own work as well as from the work of a favourite poet**

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9529041131?pwd=M2VUL3RNWGMvMFZCU1Zuemt6QnU3Zz09

Date: 20th January 2022
Time: 19:30 SAST

Meeting ID: 952 904 1131
Passcode: 12345

Poems by poets featured previously at TRW can be found here:
https://redwheelbarrowpoet.wixsite.com/website