Join Holly Wren Spaulding and Brit Washburn—poets, friends, and fellow Interlochen Arts Academy graduates—as they celebrate the release of Brit's latest collection, What is Given (Wet Cement Press, 2025). Both northern Michigan natives have gone on to publish and teach creative writing across the country, most recently in Maine and Virginia. 

This event will include a conversation about imagination's cultural significance at this moment in our collective history, and take place in the gallery, surrounded by art work.

Poetry has been with us since humans first gathered around fires, and it continues to be one of the ways we make sense of the world, through rhythm and image and the simple need to say what matters most. There's something stubborn and essential about this impulse to transform experience into art, to find the words that feel right and true to our experience of being alive. 

Imagine an evening where poetry and visual art converge in one of northern Michigan's most charming coastal villages. V Gallery in Omena is intimate, thoughtful, and surrounded by the quiet beauty of the Leelanau Peninsula. Come for the rare pleasure of experiencing words and images together, in a space where art and artists feel at home.

Light refreshments, books, and letterpress prints will be available.