Poets Linda Parsons and Stellasue Lee will open National Poetry Month with “Love, Loss, and Morning Light,” a call-and-response reading from their new poetry collections, Candescent (Iris Press 2019) and Queen of Jacks: New and Selected Poems (Bombshelter Press 2019). In finely crafted work about childhood’s shaky ground, old and new love, caregiving for parents, animal spirits, and the healing path of meditation, Parsons and Lee explore grief and ungrieving into joy.

Linda Parsons is the reviews editor for Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel and the copy editor for Chapter 16, the literary website of Humanities Tennessee. She has contributed poetry to The Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Baltimore Review, Shenandoah, and Ted Kooser’s syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among many others. Candescent is her fifth poetry collection (Iris Press, 2019).

Stellasue Lee was a founding editor of RATTLE, a poetry journal, and is now editor Emerita. She is a host of WordStream on WDVX with Linda Parsons. Two of her books have been entrants for the Pulitzer Prize, Firecracker Red, and Crossing the Double Yellow Line. Her New & Selected Poems, Queen of Jacks, was released in 2019. Dr. Lee won the grand prize of Poetry to Aide Humanity in 2013 by Al Falah in Malaysia. She now teaches privately. Dr. Lee received her Ph.D. from Honolulu University. She was born in the year of the dragon.