DiVerse Gaithersburg

As some of you may recall, last winter Librarian Eve Burton and I started working on putting together a collection of poetry books by local authors to be housed at the Quince Orchard Library. We sent out a letter asking poets who had read at DiVerse Gaithersburg to contribute copies of their books that we might include in the initial collection.

We received a number of books and Eve started the process of getting them catalogued and included in the MCPL system. And then the pandemic hit and everything shut down. I am thrilled to report that some of those books are now back at the Quince Orchard branch and will be available for check out sometime in the next month or so. If you sent in a book and you don’t see it in the picture below, they are probably still being processed. Once we get all these books back and ready to check out, I’ll post a list of what is available. And once the library does reopen, we hope to have a proper poetry nook and we will most definitely be holding a celebration for the collection at our first in-person reading!

A huge thank you is due to Eve for her vision and all the work it took to get this rolling and also to all the other library staff who have helped to make this happen. In the middle of a pandemic with the library closed and many people working from home, etc. it feels like a little miracle to have this come to fruition!

Another big thanks to everyone who has contributed books to get this collection started, this would not have been possible without you! We do hope to continue to grow the collection, and when the library is able to accept more books, I’ll let you know. We are starting by opening this up to those of you who have read at DiVerse Gaithersburg, and hope to eventually include others as well.

I know this is probably not a surprise, but the odds of us holding any in person readings this spring are pretty close to nil. The library is still closed to regular use (although you can still get quite a few things online/pick up holds, etc.) and there is no way to know when it will reopen to the public. We could try online readings, but because those readings are now effectively global and anyone can go to a reading anywhere, there is already a cornucopia of readings that we can all attend, and rather than try to stand out in that crowd) and the work it would take to do that!), we are going to stay dormant for now and hold for when we can meet again in person. Not an easy decision to make, but a practical one.

I hope all of you are doing as well as you can and finding good poetry and moments of joy as we all try to navigate through this perilous time.-Lucinda

Due to the pandemic, DiVerse Gaithersburg will unfortunately not be reading in person this fall. While holding readings online is an option, for a number of reasons, we will not be doing this. It is possible we may hold a few pop-up readings as we work our way through the second half of the year, but for the most part, we will be holding out until we can read in person again!

Great thanks to E. Ethelbert Miller and Katherine E. Young for joining us on Zoom for an illuminating and thought-provoking conversation about writing poetry during the pandemic. We hope to have a plan in place for fall by mid-summer and will post that when we do.

Our April reading was our last regularly scheduled event for the spring. Thank you so much to everyone who joined us on Zoom for a fabulous evening with Gregory Luce, Diane Wilbon Parks, and Naomi Thiers. As much as we would rather read in person in our usual venue at the library, it was fun to be able to share our reading with people from all over the country!

Normally right now I would be working on our fall schedule, but it is not yet clear whether it will be feasible to have a normal schedule in the fall, so I am going to wait until we know that. In the interim, we will likely have some additional Zoom gatherings, so stay tuned and stay well!

We have moved our April reading to an online venue and will be reading at 7 pm instead of our usual afternoon reading time. Because of safety concerns with trolls, I won’t be posting the log on information here. If you would like to join us, please send a message with your name and email address and I will add you to the notification list. An open mic will follow the reading.

It will likely come as no surprise that we will not be holding our April reading at the library. However we are going to try to do an online reading and open mic, probably the evening of April 19th, rather than during the day. Once the details of that are worked out, I will post them here and on our Facebook page.