Cap: Gailmarie Pahmeier reads at the Oats Park Art Center on Nov. 17.
Gailmarie Pahmeier will have a reading of her award-winning poetry from 5-7 p.m. Saturday at the Oats Park Art Center, 151 E. Park St. The event is free to the public.
The date also marks the conclusion of two art exhibits: Jay Schmidt’s “The Middle Of Nowhere” — Recent Sculptures, Paintings and Collaborations” and Kirk Robertson’s “Homage to Collage” — Mixed Media Works from Three Decades.
Pahmeier is the 2017-18 recipient of the Nevada Arts Council’s Major Project Fellowship, the most prestigious individual grant awarded by the NAC.
During her fellowship year, Pahmeier has been traveling throughout the state, spending two-three day residencies in Nevada state parks. While in residency, she has been gathering and composing narratives about the people she encounters in these often remote locations with some attention paid to the landscape itself.
This literary arts project has been an act of both imagination and observation; Pahmeier was careful not to impose upon the privacy so many seek in our state parks. The ultimate goal of this project is to hear and imagine the voices and lives of those in our state parks and to get some of those stories heard. A statewide reading tour of the final project is underway, and Pahmeier is particularly delighted to be returning to Fallon – truly one of her favorite places in all of Nevada.
Her work has been widely published and anthologized. Recent journals and magazines include Booth, Spillway, descant (her poem in this journal earned the 2012 Publisher’s Award), Passager and Pedestal Magazine; her anthologized work appears in such publications as Literary Nevada, New Poets of the American West (her poem in this anthology earned the Editor’s Choice Award), The Autumn House Press Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems. She is the author of the poetry collections The House on Breakaheart Road and The Rural Lives of Nice Girls in addition to three chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook, Shake It and It Snows, won the 2009 Coal Hill Chapbook Award.
Her literary awards include a Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, two Artists Fellowships from the Nevada Arts Council (she was the first literary artist awarded a fellowship in the state of Nevada), and she has served the state as Poet in Residence. In 2007, she received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; in 2015, she was appointed as the first Poet Laureate of Reno; and in 2016, she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.