On December 1 at 7pm, Noel Crook and James R. Dennis, two Texas poets will read from their recently published works. 

About Noel Crook

Salt Moon was winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, the Julie Suk Award for a best book of poetry published by a university or independent press, and and a finalist for the Texas Institute of Letters 2016 Bob Bush Award for First Book of Poetry. Drawing on myth, memory and imagination, Crook's poems range wide, from Comanche raids in Texas to a slave plantation in North Carolina, from a carpet maker in Istanbul to the beggars in New Delhi, from her daughter's hospital room to the war in Iraq. Naomi Shihab Nye said of Salt Moon, "I feel carried away by these rapturously perfect poems. Hold any line or stanza in your mind – it bears the exact weight, energy and detail needed to create the scenes and worlds inhabiting this most potent, tender collection."

Noel Crook was raised in Texas, and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.  She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University and will be teaching for the Duke University Osher Institute in the fall.

About James R. Dennis

Correspondence in D Minor was published in September of this year by Stephen F. Austin Press. Many (although not all) of the poems are written as fictional letters to or from figures from literature, history and scripture. Many of the poems draw upon well established poetry forms. The San Antonio Express News said the collection "casts a warm, wise and meditative eye on questions of life and death, love and hatred, war and peace, faith and doubt, that become more acute as the mind and heart mature, and takes the measure of what it means to be human."

James R. Dennis is a novelist, a poet, and a Domincan friar. Along with two friends,  he is a co-author of the Miles Arceneaux mystery series. He also writes and teaches on spiritual matters. He was born in West Texas, and lives in San Antonio with his two ill-behaved dogs.