Ever since Zach Charles and I became friends over two years ago, I have been stunned by his capacity to take in content from the massive information firehouse and turn it into poetry postcards, engaged workshop participation and a new book to be published by Carbonation Press. He moved here from North Carolina after graduating from Elon University and we bonded over baseball, Spanish and poetry. He’s done what he can to get my level of Spanish up past about the first grade level and continues to have a good attitude about it. He has taken on audio assistant duties and begun producing the Cascadian Prophets podcast, selecting from our large audio archive interviews he thinks have retained their potency.
His new book TWENTYFOUR PORTRAITS AT TWENTYFOUR is a deep dive into his own personal mythology and a strong debut. I wish I was this far ahead in the game when I was 24, but I was more focused on radio, ironically living in his hometown, Baltimore, in the first stop away from Chicago in my radio career. That his book is being published by Carbonation Press is also a very satisfying development, as Carbonation Publisher Greg Bem has also been associated with the Cascadia Poetics Lab for fifteen years. Thanks Greg! Congrats Zach! See you Wednesday at Hugo House.