Five Nevada County Women Poets Read

As one of many pop-up events in celebration of National Poetry Month, the Five Nevada County Women Poets will, for the ninth year, read poems about hope and history, love and life, the joys and tribulations of our time and place…and more. The pop-up fringe events lead up to the all-day Sierra Poetry Festival on Saturday, April 12, at the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley.

Collectively, the poets—Kirsten Casey, Judy Crowe, Molly Fisk, Ingrid Keriotis, and Judie Rae—have published hundreds of poems in books, magazines, anthologies, newspapers, and literary journals.

Kirsten Casey, Nevada County poet laureate emerita, is the author of Ex Vivo: Out of the Living Body. Her latest poetry manuscript Grieving Bird, which explores historical and literary characters struggling with social media, was a finalist for the Gunpowder Press Dryden-Vreeland Poetry Prize. Kirsten facilitates the popular monthly Poetry Happy Hour.

Judy Crowe has taught creative writing, children’s literature, public speaking, and English literature and composition at Sierra College. She has been active in Nevada County’s literary community for many years, including as a board member of Literature Alive! She is the author of the poetry chapbook Flat Water: Nebraska Poems. Her poetry collection The Watching Sky was published in 2024.

Molly Fisk, Nevada County’s first poet laureate, is the author of The More Difficult Beauty and Everything But the Kitchen Skunk, among other titles. She edited California Fire & Water:A Climate Crisis Anthology, with an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Walking Wheel, her next collection, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Ingrid Keriotis’s poetry collection It Started with the Wild Horses explores how our experiences and relationships become memory, how encountering the wilderness shapes us, and how a sense of place tells us who we are. The poems take the reader from Greece to California, from adolescence to parenthood, from classroom to orchard, and from grief to hope. Ingrid is the Coordinator of the Tutor Center at Sierra College’s Nevada County Campus.

Judie Rae’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and in her poetry chapbooks, The Weight of Roses and Howling Down the Moon, and Family Matters, her new poetry collection. She co-edited the recent anthology Old Hands Young Hearts. For 27 years Judie taught college English classes. Now retired, she teaches memoir and poetry classes for OLLI at Sierra College.