Join Eat My Words on May 27 for an evening of vibrant, enlivening poetry perfomed by local authors Sharon Chmielarz and Larry Schug.

Sharon Chmielarz has received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, MN State Arts Board, and Region 2 grants. She is the recipient of the 2012 Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize from Water~Stone Review. Her work Calling was awarded first runner-up in the Indie Book Awards, 2011. An author of children's books and a finalist in the National Poetry Series, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in ’99, ’01, ’02, ’05, ’07, ’10, and ’13. She’s been featured on “American Life in Poetry” and translated into French and Polish. The Rhubarb King won a Merit Award from the 2007 Midwest Independent Publishers Association. The Other Mozart has been made into a two-part opera. Her latest books are Love from the Yellowstone Trail (2013) and Visibility: Ten Miles, a Prairie Memoir in Photography and Poetry (2015).

Larry Schug is the author of eight books of poems: Scales Out of Balance (1990); Caution: Thin Ice (1993); The Turning of Wheels (2001); Arrogant Bones (2008); Nails (2011); At Gloaming (2014); and A Blanket of Raven Feathers (2017)—all published by North Star Press of St. Cloud, Minnesota. Schug is also the author of a chapbook, Obsessed with Mud, published by Poetry Harbor, Duluth, Minnesota. Caution: Thin Ice was a 1993 Minnesota Book Award finalist and Arrogant Bones was a 2008 Midwest Book Award finalist. Schug has won two Central Minnesota Arts Board Individual Artist awards, a 2014 Central Minnesota Arts Board Established Artist award, and a 2008 McKnight Fellowship for Writers award. He lives beside a large tamarack bog with his wife and their dog and cats in St. Wendel Township, Minnesota.