Jo Angela Edwins
The nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with Jo Angela Edwins, Poet Laureate of the Pee Dee and author of A Dangerous Heaven, on Saturday, July 13, at 5:00 p.m., at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort). Free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing. Please call to reserve your seat in advance: 843-379-7025.
Edwins will also lead a poetry writing workshop earlier that afternoon, from 2:00-4:00 p.m.: Mystifying the Familiar: Uniting the Wondrous and the Ordinary in Poetry. Details and registration: https://mystifyingthefamiliar.eventbrite.com
About the book and author
A Dangerous Heaven creates personal and political conversations that resound through both the sacred and the secular worlds. Jo Angela Edwins has spent the past many years excavating those personal relationships which shape and haunt us. She turns the same observant eye on events happening around the word. From “The Last Wild Elephant Alive” to “Death, A Rock Icon, and Sewage Pipes” Edwins is able to draw the reader into seeing events from her own unique perspective.
“In A Dangerous Heaven, Jo Angela Edwins walks us through a multi-layered grief process for accumulated wrongs and losses: historical,
biblical, global, national, and personal. “It is your responsibility to grieve,” one poem says, and this is not a command, but an acknowledgement. These poems don’t look away from wounds, especially those of women, and they don’t turn elsewhere for comfort, yet they leave me feeling seen and comforted. Everyone needs to read this book.”–Katie Manning, author of Tasty Other
“An intimate volume with cosmic reach, witty and compassionate, A Dangerous Heaven transports us through a wide range of emotions, carries us to lofty and surprising places which might be dangerous if we didn’t have Jo Angela Edwins’s sure hand to catch us, to place our feet firmly on home soil. Crafted to honor insight and emotion, these daring poems will keep us company over time, like trusted friends.”–Marilyn Kallet, author of Even When We Sleep
Jo Angela Edwins has published poems in over 100 journals and anthologies, including Calyx, descant, The Hollins Critic, and New South. She is the author of the collection A Dangerous Heaven (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2023) and the chapbooks Bitten (forthcoming from dancing girl press, 2024) and Play(Finishing Line Press, 2016). She has received awards from Winning Writers, Poetry Super Highway, and the SC Academy of Authors and is a Pushcart Prize, Forward Prize, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry nominee. A native of North Augusta, she now lives in Florence, where she teaches at Francis Marion University and serves as the first poet laureate of the Pee Dee region of South Carolina.
Learn more about the Pat Conroy Literary Center at www.patconroyliterarycenter.org.
