Saturday evening is the last opportunity to view “Shelf Life: Paintings and Objects,” the current exhibit at the Sacramento Poetry Center  featuring the work of poet laureate emeritus Julia Connor. The closing reception, free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. and will feature the music of Barkin’ Dog Bluegrass, a California-based band that plays traditional and progressive bluegrass, and a poetry reading by the artist Julia Connor. “I think of this exhibition as a gathering, a way of sharing where I have been by sharing with you what remains,” Connor wrote in her statement about “Shelf Life.”  

Poets and musicians gathered Friday night at the Guild Theatre to raise funds for C.O.R.E., Chicano Organizing and Research in Education, and their Que Llueva Café scholarship fund. C.O.R.E. is a non-partisan, research, and advocacy organization with the purpose of improving the education environment of all Chicano/Latino students. C.O.R.E.’s membership, including its board members, come from various backgrounds and fields and support the organization’s many efforts, which include a variety of scholarships, such as the Que Llueva Café. The Que Llueva Café scholarship was founded in response to “what is an unfair immigration system that continues to deprive aspiring new scholars from cont

Put a poem in your pocket or tuck one into someone else’s pocket this Thursday because April is National Poetry Month and April 26 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. This annual event was started by the Academy of American Poets who “encourage folks to stuff their pockets with their favorite poems and spend the day sharing them with others,” says Richard Hansen, proprietor of The Book Collector in Midtown. Hansen is no stranger to small poems, as his own project, Poems-For-All, is about the creation and scattering of poems. “It is about building tiny books of poetry to be scattered like seeds,” he said. “These little books fit perfectly into pockets.” Hansen creates these books for special ev

April 1 kicked off National Poetry Month, an event “inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996 . . . when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events.” Although National Poetry Month is held every April, and Sacramento and its neighbors are celebrating in various ways, Sacramento is certainly no stranger to poetry and the banding together of poets. About poetry, bookseller Richard Hansen, aka The Book Collector (24th a

On Sunday morning at the University of California, Davis Mondavi Center, Kevin O’Connor, Slater Penney, Christine Germain and Emily Leap led two free workshops on rope climbing, juggling, building human pyramids and using the trapeze. Each 90-minute workshop accommodated 60 very lucky participants ranging from age 4 to adult. More than 300 people could not be accommodated. Kevin O’Connor, an MFA choreography candidate and graduate of the National Circus School of Montreal, was the event’s organizer. O’Connor invited three other trained professionals to lead the four simultaneous workshops sponsored by the new UC Davis Institute for Exploration in Theatre, Dance and Performance. The morn