Shirley Brewer: WILD GIRLS (In Conversation With Dean Smith)
Please join The Ivy in welcoming Shirley Brewer for a celebration of WILD GIRLS, her latest collection of poetry, published by Baltimore-based Apprentice House Press!
Dean Bartoli Smith will join Shirley in conversation.
Shirley J. Brewer is a poet, educator, and workshop facilitator. She serves as poet-in-residence at Carver Center for the Arts & Technology in Baltimore. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems garnish Barrow Street, Passager, Gargoyle, Little Patuxent Review, Poetry East, Slant, among many other journals and anthologies. Shirley’s poetry books include A Little Breast Music (Passager Books), After Words (Apprentice House Press) and Bistro in Another Realm (Main Street Rag). Her fourth poetry collection, Wild Girls, is forthcoming from Apprentice House Press in June, 2023.
Shirley was interviewed in January, 2020 by Maryland poet laureate, Grace Cavalieri, for her long-running series “The Poet and the Poem” at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where her poems are now archived.
Shirley lives and writes in the Charles Village community of Baltimore. She epitomizes the “Wild Girl Spirit.”
Born and raised in Baltimore, Dean Bartoli Smith is a published poet, author and journalist. His recent collection of poems, Baltimore Sons (Stillhouse Press, 2021) offers a wrenching examination of our troubled attachments to place and the deepest wounds of the American psyche. His poetry has appeared in Smartish Pace, Poetry East, Open City, Beltway, Gulf Stream, and Upstreet, among others. His first book of poems, American Boy (Washington Writers Publishing House, 2000) won the 2000 Washington Writer’s Prize and was awarded the Maryland Prize for Literature in 2001. He is also the author of Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season (Temple University Press, 2013). Smith received an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University in 1989. He is an adjunct professor of publishing in the Master of Professional Studies program at George Washington University and the director of Duke University Press. One of his all-time favorite moments was doing a public talk with John Cleese.
