Arts-Entertainment
Elk River Books presents “A Trio of Poets,” an evening of readings by Montana poets Corrie Williamson and Charles Finn, and Wisconsin’s Austin Segrest, on Thursday, July 24th at 7 pm. Elk River Books is located at 122 S. 2nd St. The event is free and will be followed by a reception and book signing.
Williamson is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Your Mother’s Bear Gun, released in 2025 from River River Books. Her other books include The River Where You Forgot My Name (a 2019 Montana Book Award finalist) and Sweet Husk (winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and a finalist for the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry). She is also a co-editor of the anthology A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains, forthcoming from Mountaineers Books. Her work has appeared widely in literary journals such as The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Missouri Review, Ecotone and others. She was the recipient of the 2020 Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, spending seven-and-a-half months living off-grid in a remote section of the Rogue River. She lives in Lewistown.
Finn is the former editor of the literary and fine art magazine High Desert Journal, author of the nonfiction collection, Wild Delicate Seconds: 29 Wildlife Encounters, and two poetry collections, On a Benediction of Wind: Poems and Photographs from the American West, winner of the 2022 Montana Book Award, and A Mountain’s Idea of Time. He is the co-editor of the textbook/anthology The Art of Revising Poetry: 21 U.S. Poets on Their Drafts, Craft, and Process, as well as co-editor of the poetry anthology, We Are All God’s Poems. He lives in Havre with his wife Joyce Mphande-Finn and their two cats, Tija and Rilke.
Segrest is the author of Groom. His first book, Door to Remain, won the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. His poems can be found in POETRY, VQR, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, Ecotone, The Common, New England Review, Ploughshares and many other journals. His essays on poetry can be found in APR, Poetry Northwest, 32 Poems, Southern Humanities Review, On the Seawall and Pleiades. Originally from Alabama, he holds a PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Missouri and an MFA from Georgia State. He has received fellowships from Ucross Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the NEH. A former poetry editor of The Missouri Review, he currently teaches at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
For those who can’t attend in person, the event will live-stream at YouTube.com/ElkRiverBooks. For more information, send an email to info@elkriverbooks.com or call (406) 333-2330.