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Meet the Poets

Host: Becca Lee Gardner
Friday Night: Sean Jones, Rachel White, Adam Haver
Saturday Night: Lorraine Jeffery, Susan Izatt Foster, David Rothman 

Becca Lee Gardner is an 8-time Honorable Mention Winner from the Writers of the Future contest. Worldbreaker: An Eldros Legacy Novel won the Utah Author’s League 2024 Recommended Read Award. Becca writes novels, comic books, screenplays, and short stories.

Sean Jones is an author and poet originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in Psychology. He then served for twenty-five years in the United States Army as a linguist, learning Arabic and Polish along the way. After retiring as a First Sergeant Sean and his family returned to Utah after many years away. Sean’s poems are strongly influenced by his time in the Army and by the joys and challenges of living with and caring for those with disabilities. His first book of poetry, “Love and Other Four Letter Words” (Moon in the Rye Press) was published in 2024. His poems appear in the anthology “Strong at Broken Places” (LUW Press), and in the online journal “Inkpot.” He has several poetry and fiction projects in the works. Sean and his family settled in his ancestral home of Monroe, Utah in 2022.

Rachel White studied poetry at the University of Utah.

Adam Haver is a poet born and raised in Utah. He received the Willie Morris Award from the University of Mississippi as well as an award from the Utah Division of Arts & Museums in the Utah Original Writing Competition. His work has been featured in Stone Circle Review, Popshot Quarterly, Poetry Scotland, and elsewhere.

Lorraine Jeffery delights in her closeup view of the Utah mountains after living and working in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, Georgia and Oregon. She earned a MLIS degree in library science, and managed public libraries for over twenty years but she states that her real education didn’t take place in a classroom. But rather in her home, where she and her husband raised their ten children (eight diverse adopted children and two biological) as well as three foster children. There is an old adage that states that with age comes wisdom but she contends that sometimes age shows up by itself. Her prose has appeared in many publications, including persimmon Tree, Focus on the Family, Elsewhere, Ocotillo, Utah Senior Review and Mature Years. Her first novel, Death is Always a Resident was published by Cedar Press. She has won poetry prizes in state and national contests and published over 200 poems in journals and anthologies including Clockhouse, Tahoma Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, Rockhurst Review, and Utah Life. Her first book, When the Universe Brings Us Back, was published in 2022. Her chapbook titled, Tethers, was published in 2023 and her second titled Saltwater Soul was published in 2024, both by Kelsay Books.

Susan Izatt Foster is a fifth generation Utahn who lives at the intersection of the Colorado Plateau, the Great Basin, and the Mohave (rhymes with so-suave-eee) Desert. She grew up in the beautiful Nittany Valley of central Pennsylvania and the Edgemont area of Provo, Utah,and learned to love the wild landscape of these places as they were in the 1950s and 60s. Her writing explores the many dimensions of grief, loss, place, beauty, and the land. Her lifelong love of the desert and classical music intersect in many of the poems she will read tonight. Her writing has been published in ICON, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Panorama, Utah Lake Stories, and elsewhere. In addition to degrees in elementary education and accounting, she has a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is currently a violin and piano teacher and a faculty member at Mohave (rhymes with “so-suave–eee”) College. Her book of poetry, The Falling Water Calls It Grief, won the Utah State Poetry Society’s 2023 Book Publication Award.

When young, David J. Rothman had the good fortune to study with the poets Czesław Miłosz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and Robert Fitzgerald. Also a musician, he studied classical bassoon with Emil Hebert and Leonard Sharrow, jazz piano with Kenny Barron and Peter Barbieri, and served as co-founder and first Executive Director of the Crested Butte Music Festival in Colorado. His most recent books are a textbook, Learning the Secrets of English Verse (Springer 2022), co-authored with Susan Spear, and My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic 2019), a Finalist for the Colorado Book Award in poetry. Over the last 40 years, his poems and essays have appeared in Agni, AppalachiaAtlantic MonthlyBest American Poetry Blog, Classical Outlook, Gettysburg ReviewHudson ReviewThe JournalKenyon ReviewPoetry,Sewanee Review, Threepenny Review and scores of other newspapers, magazines, and journals. In 2019 he won a Pushcart Prize for the poem “Kernels,” which originally appeared in The New Criterion. In 2024 he won the Karen Chamberlain Lifetime Achievement Award for Poetry in Colorado, and a prize from Sport Literate for “A Sweet, Wild Passion,” selected by Sydney Lea as the best submitted poem about sports in the 1970s. He is also the author of Living the Life: Tales from America’s Mountains and Ski Towns (Conundrum 2013), much of which is set in Utah, where he now lives full-time in Salt Lake City.