Ken Sanders Rare Books - Press Release

Start Date: 11/12/08

Reading & Book Signing with Poets Shaun Griffin & Chris Cokinos

Ken Sanders Rare Books is pleased to announce a reading and book signing by poets Chris Cokinos and Shaun Griffin on Wednesday, December 3rd at 7:00 p.m. at our downtown bookstore (268 South 200 East). Books by both authors will be available for purchase and signing. This event is free and open to the public.

Christopher Cokinos is an American poet and writer of nonfiction on nature and the environment. Born in 1963 in Indianapolis, Indiana, he studied at Indiana University at Bloomington (BA 1981) and at Washington University in St. Louis (MFA 1991). He taught at Kansas State University from 1991-2002. He also served as president of the Kansas Audubon Council from 1996-98. He is now an assistant professor of English at Utah State University and founding editor of Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing. He also teaches in the Chatham University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. In 2003, he was one of 10 national recipients of the Whiting Writers' Award, given annually to emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise. He is the author a book of poems, Killing Season, as well as Hope is a Thing With Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds.

Shaun Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a non-profit agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991, and the former founding director of the state's homeless youth education office. Shaun has spent a lifetime trying to build bridges where there were none for all members of the human community. During the mid-80s he worked in Stanford University's foremost community outreach program, starting several disability initiatives on that campus. He later founded a minority youth outreach program at four universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2004, he received the Mike O'Callaghan Humanitarian Award, named after the former Nevada Governor.

For many years he has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and until 2003, published an annual journal of their work, Razor Wire. He regularly contributes poetry, essays, and translations to literary journals, and was editor-at-large at Calapooya and contributing editor at Weber Studies. He recently finished a memoir about a long journey with his family from Tokyo to Patagonia, The House of a Thousand Arms. He received the Rosemary McMillan Lifetime Achievement in Art Award in 2006, awarded by Sierra Arts Foundation, Reno, Nevada, and the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1995.

He lives in Virginia City, at the western-most edge of the Great Basin.

For further information, contact:
Ken Sanders Rare Books
268 South 200 East
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
(801) 521-3819

Kill Date: 12/03/08