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  • Date: December 13
  • Time: 7:00pm - 7:00pm PT

Copper Canyon Press Showcase and Holiday Book Sale

This year’s annual Copper Canyon Press holiday celebration—book sale, reading, and party at the Hugo House—will celebrate socially-engaged poetry, with poems that take on climate change, gender justice, issues of labor and class, and life at the U.S-Mexico border.

Elizabeth J. Coleman will travel from New York to read from the groundbreaking anthology of eco-poetry Here: Poems for the Planet; Taneum Bambrick will read from Vantage, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Award selected by Sharon Olds; Natalie Scenters-Zapico will read from her critically acclaimed collection Lima::Limon; and teen writer Evelia Arcis Taylor will read from the children/teen section of Here: Poems for the Planet. The band Glass Heart String Choir will perform live music. Hosted by Copper Canyon Press editor Elaina Ellis.

Those who RSVP for a free ticket will be gifted a complimentary book of poetry.

  • 7 pm: Book sale opens
  • 8 pm: Reading
  • 9 pm: Raise a glass to another great year in poetry!


Here: Poems for the Planet is a lovesong to a planet in crisis. Summoning a chorus of over 125 diverse poetic voices—including Mary Oliver, Robert Hass, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ross Gay, W.S. Merwin, Natalie Diaz, Kimiko Hahn, and others—this anthology approaches the impending environmental crisis with a sense of urgency and hopefulness. Now is the time for this book, as it seeks to galvanize readers, students, teachers, philanthropists, and everyday people to address the realities of climate change head on and become individual catalysts for change. Here looks at the world with a renewed sense of courage, fighting fear that so often leads to indifference and cynicism. The anthology also includes an activist guide, created in tandem with the Union of Concerned Scientists, and an introduction by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. With these poems, we hope you will see with new eyes what the astronauts saw the first time they peered down from space at our tiny world.


About the Performers

Taneum Bambrick is the author of Vantage, which was selected by Sharon Olds for the 2019 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Award (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Her chapbook, Reservoir, was selected by Ocean Vuong for the 2017 Yemassee Chapbook Prize. A graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program, she is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize, an Environmental Writing Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Arts Center, and the 2018 BOOTH Nonfiction Contest. Her poems and essays appear in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, PEN, Narrative, the Missouri Review, 32 Poems, West Branch, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers conferences. She is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Elizabeth J. Coleman is a poet, public-interest attorney, environmental activist, and teacher of mindfulness. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016) and Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Presss Brittingham and Pollak prizes. Her poems have been published in a number of journals, including Rattle and the Bellevue Literary Revue, and a number of anthologies, including Poetry in Medicine Anthology (Persea Books, 2014) and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry (2013). She is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. A member of the New York, Georgia, and D.C. Bars, and a past attorney and board chair at several nonprofit legal organizations, Elizabeth runs a small environmental nonprofit. In Here: Poems for the Planet, Elizabeth has brought together her love for poetry, for justice, and for our planet.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Her first collection The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing, 2015) won the PENAmerican/Joyce Osterweil Award, GLCA’s New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, and Utah Book Award. Lima :: Limón, her second collection, was published in 2019 by Copper Canyon Press. She has won fellowships from the Lannan Foundation (2017), CantoMundo (2015), and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation (2018). Her poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines including Best American Poetry 2015, Poetry, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more.

Ian Williams and Katie Mosehauer are Glass Heart String Choir, a classically-influenced baroque-pop duo that writes emotionally-charged, cinematic songs.