Please join Red Bird Chapbooks for an evening of poetry and prose at Artista Bottega on Friday, June 16, 2017.  The reading will begin at 7:00 pm.

Norita Dittberner-Jax has published four collections of poetry, most recently, Stopping For Breath from Nodin Press. Crossing The Water, her 5th collection, will be published by Nodin in June, 2017. Norita has won numerous awards and fellowships, among them several nominations for the Pushcart. One of the poetry editors for Red Bird Chapbooks, Norita lives with her husband in Lilydale, Minnesota on the banks of the Mississippi River.

Donna Isaac, a retired English/writing professor, is proud to be Red Bird's first published writer with her chapbook Holy Comforter and a broadside "Bathing." She has published one other poetry chapbook, Tommy (Red Dragonfly Press) and has most recently been published by St. Paul Almanac, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Plein Air, and Martin Lake Anthology. Pocahontas Press will soon publish her first book of poetry, Footfalls. She currently works with Cracked Walnut and the League of Minnesota Poets and lives on a pond with her husband Matt. (donnaisaacpoet.com)

Vicky Lettmann grew up in southeastern North Carolina near the Atlantic Ocean where she learned to love the taste of salt water and the smell of the tides. She created Turtle House Ink and published The Beach, a collection of her poems with artwork by her mother, Ruth. For over thirty years, she taught writing and literature at North Hennepin Community College. She teaches writing workshops in Sanibel, Florida, where she and her husband, John, spend the winters. Her writing has appeared in Twenty-six Minnesota Writers, Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude, and other publications. She is co-editor with Carol Roan of When Last on Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. She received an MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College and is a recipient of a Loft-McKnight Fellowship. 

David Oppegaard is the author of the MN Book Award finalist The Firebug of Balrog County, the Bram Stoker-nominated The Suicide Collectors, And the Hills Opened Up, and Wormwood, Nevada. David's newest book, The Town Built on Sorrow, comes out this September from Flux. 

Craig Ruhland is a poet and all around creative spirit. He's built art sleds for the Powderhorn Art Sled Rally; acted in and supported movies for the 48-hour Film Festival; and wrote Sweet on America: the Twin Cities, a travel guide to bakeries in the Twin Cities.

Dorothy Schlesselman was born in Iowa, raised in Kansas City, Missouri, and educated at Macalester College and the University of Minnesota Department of Art. Schlesselman has been inspired by Lake Superior’s wild beauty ever since her first year at Macalester, when she spent a snowy May weekend in Duluth. Lake Superior is featured in many of the poems in her chapbook, This Wild Country, published in 2015 by Finishing Line Press. Dorothy’s poems also appear in A Little Book of Abundance, released by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2016. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.