Chaucer’s Poetry Reading

Tuesday, December 10, 2024  at  6PM

Chaucer’s Books hosts poets David Starkey (You, Caravaggio )and Catherine Abbey Hodges (Empty Me Full) for a reading and book signing.

David Starkey’s You, Caravaggio is a biography in poems of the great Italian painter. Carrie Patterson, editor of the Nomadic Journal, writes of the book: “The unanswered questions about Caravaggio’s life, the silences and darkness, are manifest through Starkey’s curiosity and vivid rendering, a biography befitting both the dramatic arc of the painter’s life and our yearning relationship to art and to history.”

In the words of fellow poet Barbara Rockman, Catherine Abbey Hodges’ new collection of poems, Empty Me Full, is “an invitation to intimate conversation with a wise and affectionate seeker. Here is a wit-laced and vulnerable wondering. In poems that turn grief to awe and sadness to wonder, the poet celebrates our stunning, imperfect lives.”

David Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. Emeritus Professor and the Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, he is currently Co-editor of Anacapa Review and The California Review of Books, and Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. More than 500 of his poems have been published in English-language journals around the world. His most recent book of poetry is You, Caravaggio, with another, The Moon Shall Not Give Her Light, due out in January 2025. David’s bestselling textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief(Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2022), is in its fourth edition. (davidstarkey.net)

Catherine Abbey Hodges’ latest book is Empty Me Full. Author of Instead of Sadness (2015) and Raft of Days (2017), Catherine was the winner of the inaugural Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in venues including The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Connotation Press, Cider Press Review and Canary and has been selected for Verse Daily. Her poems have been featured on Writer’s Almanac. All the While, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, was a finalist in the New Women’s Voices contest. A native of Santa Barbara, she is an Emeritus Professor of English at Porterville College in California’s San Joaquin Valley. (catherineabbeyhodges.com)