Thursday, May 25: UM alumna and outgoing Montana Book Festival director Rachel Mindell and Missoulian Renaissance woman Jenny Montgomery join us for a poetry reading. 7pm.

Rachel Mindell is writer and teacher originally from Tucson, Arizona. Her chapbook, A Teardrop and a Bullet, was released last year by Dancing Girl Press. Individual poems have appeared in Pool, DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, BOAAT, and elsewhere.

Jenny Montgomery will read new work as well as poems from the chapbook, Hatch, exploring a child's near-death experience and exuberant embrace of life and language. The poems free us to lighten up about death and disability, even as we confront their mysteries.

"Electrifying. This is transformation art!" --David James Duncan
a person or thing long established in the same place or position.

"By embracing the beauties and brutalities of parenthood, these finely crafted poems transcend their milieu and become poems about co-existing here on earth." - Chris Dombrowski

Jenny Montgomery has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Barrow Street, Tar River, CALYX, Unsplendid, the New York Times, Gathering of the Tribes, and the Cairo Times. Her poetry installations have been shown at galleries in Montana and Washington. She was educated at the Evergreen State College and Columbia University. She resides in Missoula, where she owns a distillery with her husband, Ryan.