Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken lectures and reads from her works at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 12, in the Carnegie Room at Port Townsend Public Library, 1220 Lawrence St.

Stan Sanvel Rubin appears with Flenniken to celebrate the publication of his book There.Here.

Flenniken was raised in Richland, Wash., and currently lives in Seattle. She came to poetry late, after working for eight years as a civil engineer and hydrologist, three of them on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. She started writing when she quit work to stay home with her young children.

For years, her subject was her daily domestic life. She saw herself as a natural historian of interiors. This is the focus of her first book, Famous.

Famous won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

In 2004, she started (without recognizing it at first) a very different project, and for close to six years she wrote almost exclusively about Hanford, where plutonium was produced for 40 years, and about its bedroom community, Richland, Wash. Plume, the resulting full-length collection of poems, is part memoir, part history lesson, part cautionary tale, part quest. This collection was recently chosen for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series.

Flenniken holds engineering degrees from Washington State University and the University of Washington, as well as a Master of Fine Arts degree from Pacific Lutheran University. She is president of Floating Bridge Press, a nonprofit organization dedicated to publishing Washington poets, and teaches poetry writing to students of all ages with the support of arts organizations such as WSAC, Seattle Arts & Lectures’ Writers in the Schools program and Jack Straw Productions.

Stan Rubin

After serving as director of the Brockport Writers Forum & Videotape Library (SUNY) for many years, Rubin moved to the Olympic Peninsula in 2003 as founding director of the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency M.F.A. program at Pacific Lutheran University. His poems have been published by such journals as AGNI, the Georgia Review, the Iowa Review, the Laurel Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, the Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs and others.

He is the author of There.Here., as well as three previous full-length poetry collections: Hidden Sequel, winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; Five Colors; and Midnight. His work has been anthologized in The Poets Guide to the Birds and Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets and elsewhere. His writing received a Constance J. Saltonstall Foundation fellowship for poetry.

This event is free and open to the public. A reception follows the reading.

For more information, contact the library at 385-3181.