SUGAR FACTORY
Monday, January 14, 7:30 pm
Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street
Host: Stuart Canton
Emily Wallis Hughes grew up in Agua Caliente, California, a small town in the Sonoma Valley. Her poems have been published in ZAUM, Gigantic Magazine, A Women’s Thing, Sacramento News & Review, and anthologized in Burning the Little Candle (Ad Lumen Press). New work is forthcoming in Menage. She earned a BA in English Literature and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from the University of California, Davis. After living in Berkeley and working in San Francisco she taught English composition and literature at American River College and Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, California. While pursuing an MFA in Poetry at New York University, Emily was a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow, working for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in partnership with the NYU Creative Writing Program. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she volunteers for Ugly Duckling Presse. Emily currently teaches creative writing at Rutgers-New Brunswick and composition at the College of Staten Island (CUNY).
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Like Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Hughes’ Sugar Factory is a laud for the land, a deep song of praise for the ecstasy in the ordinary. Riding the train, peeling fruit, contemplating streaks of color—here we find everyday encounters opening doorways to memory, both intimate and ancestral. The result is a quietly fierce collection of poems that spans coasts and continents as it boldly “carries the voices of the living/and the dead.”
— Patricia Killelea
