Flyleaf Second Sunday Poetry Series: Catherine W. Carter and Scott Owens

Join us for our Monthly Poetry series, an afternoon of poetic readings. Featured poets will each read for 20 minutes, followed by a short break to sign books, then an open mic. Please sign up by 2:30 pm, and limit your reading to one poem, one page. Hope to see you there!

Catherine Carter is the author of four full-length collections, Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press 2019), The Swamp Monster at Home (LSU Press 2012), and The Memory of Gills (LSU Press 2006), and By Stone and Needle (LSU Press 2025). Jacar Press has published her two chapbooks, Marks of the Witch and Good Morning, Unseen, and she is co-editor and co-translator, with Brian Gastle, of the first full-length verse translation into modern English of John Gower’s 33,000-line Middle English poem The Lover’s Confession (Medieval Institute Publications, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poetry, Orion, Ploughshares, RHINO, Asheville Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, NCLR, and Best American Poetry 2009, among others. She is a professor at Western Carolina University, where she helps to prepare future English teachers; on a good day, she can re-queen a hive of honeybees and roll a whitewater kayak, and on less-good days, she collects stings, rock-rash, and multiple contusions.

Poet Laureate of Hickory, NC, Scott Owens is the author of 24 collections of poetry, most recently The Song Is Why We Sing, poems about writing, and Elemental, poems about nature. Owens is recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Next Generation/Indie Lit Awards, the NC Writers Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC. His poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac 8 times, and 5 of his articles about writing poetry have been published in Poet’s Market. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was 2016 Recipient of the Pine Song Dedication for his contributions to the poetry community. Owens holds degrees from Ohio University, UNC Charlotte, and UNC Greensboro. He is Professor of Poetry at Lenoir Rhyne University, and former editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and Southern Poetry Review. He owns and operates Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse and Gallery and has coordinated Poetry Hickory in Hickory, NC, for 19 years. More at scottowenspoetry.com.