Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host an evening of readings by Charles Finn, Barbara Michelman, and Sean Hill on Thursday, December 7, at 6:00pm. Finn and Michelman will be discussing, reading, and projecting images from their Montana Book Award-winning collection On a Benediction of Wind: Poems and Photographs from the American West. Joining them will be award-winning poet Sean HIll, reading new work and selections from his two previous books of poetry, Dangerous Goods, and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor. This event is free and open to the public.

Charles Finn is the former editor of the literary and fine arts magazine High Desert Journal, author of Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters, and with photographer Barbara Michelman, author of On a Benediction of Wind: Poems and Photographs from the American West, winner of the 2022 Montana Book Award. He is co-editor of the poetry textbook, The Art of Revising Poetry: 21 U.S. Poets on their Drafts, Craft, and Process as well as co-editor of the forthcoming poetry anthology We Are All God’s Poems. A self-taught woodworker and wood artist, he is the owner of A Room of One’s Own and FINNFURNITURE & ART, where he builds custom micro-cabins, furniture, and wood sculptures using reclaimed lumber and materials. He lives in Havre, MT, with his wife Joyce Mphande-Finn and their two cats Tija and Rilke.

Photographer Barbara Michelman started in Hollywood and was one of the first women in film lighting. Widely exhibited in public and private collections here and abroad, her recent series on the aftermath of fires in the west, Fire on Every Mountain, was awarded Best of Photography at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival in California. Her work is also in the current global exhibition Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss. On a Benediction of Wind, her black and white photography book with writer Charles Finn, recently won the Montana Book Award. She lives in Missoula, Montana. 

Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book (UGA Press, 2008). He has received numerous awards including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Region 2 Arts Council, the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, The Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in southwestern Montana with his family and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

Charles Finn

Barbara Michelman

Sean Hill Photo Credit: Geoff Wyatt