The Pen is Mightier

A Literary Series presented by Bank of America

This month Helen Pruitt Wallace and Peter Meinke join The Studio @ 620 and Bank of America in presenting a poetry workshop and reading on Saturday, March 7, 2009.  Wallace is the 2007 recipient of the Richard Snyder Memorial Award for her first collection of poetry, Shimming the Glass House and an assistant professor of creative writing at Eckerd College.  Peter Meinke has penned numerous books of poetry and is the recipient of the Flannery O’conner Award in Short Fiction. 

Meet Helen Wallace and Peter Meinke as part of the on-going Pen is Mightier literary series presented by Bank of America . 

You are invited to participate in an afternoon writers workshop where Ms. Wallace and Mr. Meinke will craft and critique some pre-selected poems written by other area poets. 

There will also be an evening reading and discussion of Ms. Wallace's poetry. 

The Pen Is Mightier and The Studio @ 620, invite all members of the writing and non-writing community to come experience, explore and learn. All events are free and open to the public.

Please RSVP and reserve your seat for these events.

About the book

"Shimming the Glass House", winner of the 2007 Richard Snyder Prize, is Helen
Pruitt Wallace’s first collection of poems. Co-editor of the anthology Isle of Flowers
published by Anhinga Press, Wallace has published poems in The Literary Review,
The Midwest Quarterly, Cumberland Review, Nimrod International, Tampa Review, and other journals. She’s received a McKay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award, The dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award, a residency fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.

In Review

“ In her first book, Helen Wallace explores a range of subjects with lush language and a formal deftness that are deeply gratifying. If there is a presiding theme here, it is the tension between our ‘struggle for precision’ and the poignant fact of the imperfection all around and within us. Whether celebrating domestic life or evoking global concerns, Wallace captures the beauty in what is flawed and the flaw in what is beautiful. ‘So much of what we love is born of loss,’ she tells us. And while the world Wallace renders is a broken one, in these poems it has been honed to brightness on the strop of her passionate sensibility. This is a wonderful debut.”– Enid Shomer

“ Like Robert Frost’s, these poems have a lover’s quarrel with the world. Their words and music throw
light over dark places, and find meanings and leanings in the smallest details. Helen Wallace’s first
book is a remarkably wise and moving collection.”– Peter Meinke

“ The poems in this wonderful book have roots deep in the old, silent America: Dickinson’s bedroom,
Thoreau’s little patch by the pond. Yet life thrives here in all its gorgeous and messy abundance; there
are cheerleaders, tacos, a sixth grade science fair, the ‘sprayed turret’ of a beehive hairdo. These are the loudest quiet poems I’ve ever read.”– David Kirby