BY KAREN BOSSICK
Poet Ibe Liebenberg, an enrolled citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, will orchestrate a pop-up poetry reading at 5:30 p.m. tonight--Tuesday, April 22.
Liebenberg, current Writer-in-Residence at the Hemingway House, will share and discuss poems from his just-published collection “Birds at Night.”
The event will be held in the Cimino Plaza outside The Community Library’s Children’s Library on the corner of 4th and Walnut streets. If the weather’s bad, the reading will be moved to the Library’s Treehouse adjacent to The Children’s Library.
Liebenberg’s book-length collection of poetry features brief intense poems exploring themes of loss, trauma, PTSD and familial relationships. Said to be a haunting meditation on what keeps us up at night, they amplify the sensations and silences of interior moments of crisis and catharsis.
Birds, wolves and fire populate the stanzas, drawing on the resiliency of the natural world in the face of changing climate and stressing the need for empathy and understanding of nature and its inhabitants.
Liebenberg lives in Paradise, Calif., where he lectures at Chico State University and works as a Cal-Fire firefighter. He has an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in poetry and fiction and has been published in POETRY magazine, Threepenny Review and other sources.
He has won several awards, including the 2024 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize.
He will hold a free writing workshop, “The Art of Withholding,” on Wednesday, April 23. The workshop examines why excluding information can keep readers more engaged. To learn more, visit https://thecommunitylibrary.libcal.com/event/14228484.
The Community Library has partnered with the nonprofit Writing by Writers (WxW) to award a residency to an emerging or early-career writer like Liebenberg at the historic Ernest and Mary Hemingway House since 2021. The WxW was founded by writers Pam Houston and Karen Nelson and offers workshops, residency connections and writing contests worldwide.
“Through WxW, we have been connected for the last five years with incredible writers that we otherwise wouldn’t have met,” said Martha Williams, the library’s director of programs and education. “This year, we’re excited to have Ibe, who has just published his first collection of poetry with Texas Tech University Press as part of their Sowell Emerging Writers Prize series. He’ll be here working on a novel--his first, about firefighting in California--and we’re excited for our community to be a part of the development of his new work.”