For the Reporter

Poetry at the Rainbow Café presents the works of Finn Menzies and Tim Sherry on Monday, July 2.

The program is from 7 to 9 p.m. at the café, 112 E. Main St.

Coffee and conversation follow readings. It is an open mic opportunity. The public is invited.

About the poets

Menzies is a teacher in Seattle. Teaching is his spiritual practice and activism. He received his master of fine arts degree in poetry from Mills College in California.

Menzies’ debut collection, “Brilliant Odyssey Don’t Yearn,” was published in 2017 by Fog Machine. His poetry can also be seen in Gigantic Sequins, Quiet Lightning, Susan /the journal, Weekly Gramma, Spork, The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks and various other journals. Annually, Menzies facilitates UNdoing Ego, a workshop on meditation and generative writing.

Sherry was a student and an athlete. He is a husband and a father who has been a public high school teacher, principal and coach. He volunteered over the years in church and community activities. Always there was poetry kept private because athletes and coaches and principals and Scandinavian Lutherans don’t usually do that sort of thing.

In the last 10 years, with the support and encouragement of so many writers in the Northwest, Sherry has had poems published in Crab Creek Review, The Raven Chronicles, Seminary Ridge Review, Windfall: A Journal of Poetry of Place, Floating Bridge Review and others. He has been a Pushcart nominee, and in 2010 was an Artsmith Artist Resident on Orcas Island. Most recently, his poem, “Of Fires,” was a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and published in The Broad River Review. This is his first full-length collection.

Sherry earned a degree in English from Pacific Lutheran University and a master’s in English from the University of Chicago. He has lived in Chicago and, for a short time, in Europe, but has lived most of his life in Tacoma, where long walks, quiet days, many friends, a close family, many travels, his faith and his wife, Marcia, are the inspiration for his writing about the common things along the way.

The Rainbow Cafe, Striped Water Poets, the NorthWest Renaissance, Auburn Arts Commission, City of Auburn, and King County 4Culture make the program possible.