Mary Anna Scenga Kruch: "Water Marks" Book Launch and Poetry Reading

1 - 2:30PM

Admission by optional donation. 

Mary Anna Scenga Kruch is career educator, writer, and photographer who celebrates the natural world, Italian ancestry, and social justice in her writing. She has published a poetry chapbook, We Draw Breath from the Same Sky (2019), a full-length collection, Grace Notes: A Memoir in Poetry & Prose (2021), and a new full-length book, Water Marks (2024). Recent poetry appears in Peninsula Arts Magazine, Meat for Tea, and Lothlorien Review. Mary Anna is on the editorial board of The Awakenings Review, a journal representing work by poets, artists, and writers living with mental illness.

Book Launch: Mary Anna’s latest book, Water Marks, is inspired by the seas and ocean between here and her fatherland in Pofi, Italy, the lakes, streams, rivers, creeks, and marshes on her journey from childhood into elderhood, a lost sister, and the significance of letter writing, an often-permanent mark.

Guests:

Mary Fox, a Detroit-born poet, teacher, and storyteller, is the author of two chapbooks of poetry (Waiting for Rain and Reading Lessons). She is known in the Lansing area as a performance poet as well as a page poet and you can find her work within several anthologies, literary magazines, and posted videos. She works with Lansing Area writers to help other find their voices and to promote poetry and the spoken word including The Poetry Room and Writing at the Ledges. When she isn’t writing or performing, she loves swimming, spending time with her family, reading and attending area entertainment and performances with friends.

Peter Ruark first felt a calling to write poetry in high school and wrote in fits and starts in the decades that followed, but it was not until recent years that he began to make it a major part of his life. He regularly reads at Lansing Poetry Club events and participates in the Writing at the Ledges writers’ group. Among his favorite poets are Li Bai (Li Po), William Blake, W.H. Auden, Jane Hirshfield, Gary Snyder and Micheal O’Siadhail. He is in awe of poetry’s power to say what cannot otherwise be said and to speak directly to the intuition, and credits Auden with prompting him to write rhymed poems.