Summer is in high gear at Village Poets with two features, Rick Smith and Carol V. Davis at Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga on Aug. 25. Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Poets are encouraged to bring their best poems for the open mic. The reading starts at 4:30 p.m. and goes till 6:30 p.m.

Rick Smith was born in New York. His father was artist William A. Smith whose work is in the National Portrait Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. When Smith was 8 years old, his father took him to live in post-World War II Paris. There, he experienced the devastating aftermath of war, which features in poems his new collection entitled Ear to the Rail. The Smiths settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania where they were once snowed in with Carl Sandberg, a close family friend. Smith began writing during high school at Solebury then honed his craft at Bard College, studying with Anthony Hecht then later with Frank Polite, at University of Iowa, and Sam Eisenstein, at Los Angeles City College. During college,

Smith taught himself to play blues harmonica, a lifelong passion. He played “basket houses” in Greenwich Village and roadhouses in Duchess County, earning his chops with Big Joe Williams, Steve Mann, Van Dyke Parks, and others. Smith recorded with the Rick Smith Band, the Hangan Brothers, and currently The Mescal Sheiks, for whom he is the lyricist.

Carol V. Davis is the author of Below Zero, Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2023, Because I Cannot Leave This Body (Truman State Univ. Press, 2017) and Between Storms (TSUP, 2012). She won the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg (TSUP, 2007). Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she taught in Siberia, winter 2018 and teaches at Santa Monica College and Antioch University, Los Angeles. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020. Her poems have recently been used by Donna Sternberg and Dancers in dance concerts at the Skirball Cultural Center with the theme of ancestors’ voices.

Village Poets upcoming features: on Sept 22, Judy Kronenfeld and Lee Rossi and on Oct. 27, Lory Bedikian and Mary Torregrossa.    

More about the poets can be found at: https://villagepoets.blogspot.com/.

Bolton Hall Museum is located at 10110 Commerce Ave. in Tujunga. Bolton Hall is a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.