In celebration of National Poetry Month, the public is invited to join Tacoma Poet Laureate, Josie Emmons Turner; Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken; and poets Rick Barot and Michael Schmeltzer for a reading on April 15, at 3 p.m. at the Museum of Glass, 1801 Dock St. Admission to the reading is free and is sponsored in partnership with the Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Arts Commission.

Flenniken is the 2012-2014 Washington State Poet Laureate. Her new collection “Plume” (University of Washington Press) is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Site. Her first book “Famous” (University of Nebraska Press) won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association. Flenniken’s awards include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Artist Trust.

Turner is the 2011-2013 Tacoma Poet Laureate. She earned her Masters in Fine Arts from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University and has been published in “California Quarterly,” “Backstreet Review,” “Floating Bridge Review,” and the anthology “In Tahoma’s Shadow.” Her broadside “Pagoda” was recently published by Springtide Press. She has been an artist in resident at Centrum and teaches writing and literature at Clover Park High School.

Barot has published two books of poetry with Sarabande Books: “The Darker Fall” (2002) and “Want” (2008), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize. He was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and his poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications including “Poetry,” “The Paris Review,” “The New Republic,” and “Ploughshares.” Barot is an associate professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University and is also on the poetry faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Schmeltzer’s poems have earned many honors including four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. He helps edit “A River & Sound Review” and has been published in “Natural Bridge,” “Mid-American Review,” “Water-Stone Review,” the “New York Quarterly” and many others.

Information about the Tacoma Poet Laureate program is available online at  tacomaculture.org/arts/PoetLaureate.asp.