Join us for an afternoon with Scott Wiggerman, Paul Licce, and Joe Blanda. We’ll be launching Scott’s new poetry collection, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets; Paul will be sharing his Mueller Lake photography; and Joe will get the event off to a great start with live guitar music.

Most mornings for the past decade, Scott Wiggerman has walked the trails at Mueller Lake Park, an urban space created on land that once held the city’s airport. Awake to the landscape as he walked, Wiggerman stopped from time to time and jotted a word or phrase for a poem that would come later. Leaf and Beak is the product of these walks, of the poet’s ever watchful eye, of the discipline he learned mastering the sonnet. 

Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry: Leaf and Beak: Sonnets; Presence; and Vegetables and Other Relationships. He is the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry; Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga; and the new Wingbeats II. Recent poems have appeared in Decades Review, The Road Not Taken, Pinyon Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the anthologies This Assignment Is So Gay and Forgetting Home: Poems about Alzheimer’s. He is chief editor for Dos Gatos Press in Austin, Texas, publisher of the Texas Poetry Calendar, now in its eighteenth year.

In 1967 Paul Licce got a Polaroid Swinger for an eighth-grade graduation gift. Ever since then he’s been hooked on looking at the natural world through the lens of a camera. In April Paul created a photography exhibit at Cement Loop entitled “Mueller Fog.” During the 2014 East Austin Studio Tour, Paul exhibited a series of photographs entitled “Summer Dragons”—a set of dragonfly photographs taken at Mueller Lake Park. Paul completely understands Scott Wiggerman’s fascination with the park at Mueller.

Joe Blanda makes a living editing technical stuff and playing music, both as a solo artist and with the trio Folkwine. His poems have appeared in various regional publications such as the Texas Poetry Calendar, Borderlands, and The Enigmatist as well as the recent anthology Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga.