The next Village Poets reading at Bolton Hall Museum will be on Sunday, Aug. 23 at 4:30 p.m when two poet laureates of Ventura will be featured: Mary Kay Rummel and Mary Ann McFadden. 

Hosted by Joe DeCenzo and Alice Pero, there will also be an open mic opportunity; poets are invited to participate in the open reading segment of the event. The Bolton Hall Museum is located at 10110 Commerce Ave. in Tujunga. The reading starts at 4:30 p.m. and continues until 6:30 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. Free parking is available on the street and also at the Elks Lodge, 10137 Commerce Ave. Please visit the Village Poets blog at: https://villagepoets.blogspot.com/

Mary Kay Rummel has been named a poetry hero of Ventura County where she is a former poet laureate. Her 10th poetry collection, Little River of Amazements: New and Selected Poems, was published by Blue Light Press of San Francisco. Her books and other works have won awards from New Rivers Press, Bright Hill Press and Blue Light Press as well as The Loft in Minneapolis and other literary organizations. She is a founding member of the non-profit Ventura County Poetry Project, dedicated to connecting community through poetry. Rummel’s poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals and anthologies and, over many years, she has performed her poetry in venues in the United States, England and Ireland. She is a lifelong teacher, a professor emerita from the University of Minnesota and was on the faculty of California State University, Channel Islands.

Mary Ann McFadden is the current Ventura County poet laureate. Her first book, Eye of the Blackbird, won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry, 1995. Her second book, Devil, Dear, was published by Alice James Books in 2014. She has been published in a range of journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Kayak, The American Voice, Nimrod, Bloom, Green Mountains Review and Psychology Tomorrow. Her poems have been anthologized and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2010 she was awarded a MacDowell Fellowship and spent six weeks among the musicians and painters and writers there. Her first great teacher was Carolyn Kizer, who tutored her on Stanley Kunitz and Theodore Roethke, especially. 

She received her MFA from New York University where her teachers were Galway Kinnell, Sharon Olds and Yehuda Amichai, among others. In 2005 she had several poems set to music by Gerald Busby, which were performed at Carnegie Hall.