Capital City Arts Initiative

The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] invites you to attend a reading and writing workshop with local poet and writer Shaun Griffin at the BRIC, 108 E Proctor Street, Carson City. The writing workshop will take place Saturday, October 12 from 1–2:30pm; the reading follows immediately at 2:30pm. The free events are part of CCAI’s Books & Writers series co-sponsored with the Carson City Library. CCAI and the Library enthusiastically invite all writers and readers to attend the workshop and reading.

Shaun Griffin recently finished a memoir about thirty years of living, working and writing in the Great Basin, Anthem for a Burnished Land, and edited a book of essays on the late poet and critic, Hayden Carruth: From Sorrow’s Well: The Poetry of Hayden Carruth, released from the University of Michigan Press in 2013.

In the workshop, participants will read four Carruth poems from his major themes and then write poems using those models. In the reading, Griffin will discuss and read from the four major sections of the book and share the long journey to its publication. He will also read a few of his poems written during the time editing the book. Later in October, Mr. Griffin will give a reading and writing workshop for students at Silver Stage High School in Silver Springs, Nevada.

For many years Mr. Griffin has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and publishes a journal of their work, Razor Wire. He regularly contributes poetry, essays, and translations to literary journals, and was editor-at-large at Calapooya and contributing editor at Weber Studies. He is the author of five books of poetry (This Is What the Desert Surrenders, New and Selected Poems, 2012), editor of two anthologies, and translator of a book of poems.

Shaun Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a non-profit agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991, and the former founding director of the state’s homeless youth education office. Mr. Griffin has spent a lifetime trying to build bridges where there were none for all members of the human community. During the mid-80s he worked in Stanford University’s foremost community outreach program, starting several disability initiatives on that campus. He later founded a minority youth outreach program at four universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. He received the Rosemary McMillan Lifetime Achievement in Art Award in 2006, awarded by Sierra Arts Foundation, Reno, Nevada, and the Nevada Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1995. In 2004, he received the Mike O’Callaghan Humanitarian Award, named after the former Nevada Governor. He has lived in Nevada since 1978— except for the four years when his wife was in graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area. He lives with his family in Virginia City, Nevada.

The Capital City Arts Initiative is an artist-centered organization committed to the encouragement and support of artists and the arts and culture of Carson City and the surrounding region. The Initiative is committed to community building for the area’s diverse adult and youth populations through art projects and exhibitions, live events, arts education programs, artist residencies, and online projects.

A Nevada Arts Council Artist Residency Express Grant partially funded this project. CCAI is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, John Ben Snow Memorial Trust, City of Carson City, Nevada Arts Council, City of Carson City, Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities, U.S. Bank Foundation, John and Grace Naumann Foundation, and the Carson Nugget.