Thursday, December 1st: Poetry. University of Montana MFA alumnus Ed Skoog reads from his new book, Run the Red Lights. 7pm.

Ed Skoog's newest collection, Run the Red Lights, balances the domestic and private with the exhilaration of public performance. Writing from the new world of parenting, during naps and daycare, Skoog's poems acutely notice what is missing or transforming: solitude, privacy, public spaces, rock music, the climate. This is poetry committed to the notion that imaginative forces can counteract the violence in public places that has changed the nature of solitude and community. 

"Ed Skoog is a master of mischief and misdirection... I find a unique alchemy in this book: a deep sadness combined with a broad humor, and most of all a sense that I'm being allowed to see a poet watching himself in the midst of evolving, captured in motion like a series of time-lapse photographs." -Susan Cohen, Prairie Schooner

Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas, and earned his MFA at the University of Montana. His first three books, Mister Skylight (2009), Rough Day (2013), and Run the Red Lights (2016) are all published by Copper Canyon Press. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The PEaris Review and Ploughshares, among other publications, and earned the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award, the Washington State Book Award, the Faulkner's Marble Faun Prize in Poetry, a fellowship with Break Loaf, and residencies with George Washington University and the Richard Hugo House. He lives in Portland, Oregon.