An Evening with Poet David Salner

PSPL is pleased to join with Broadstone Books in presenting a reading and book signing by author David Salner.

David Salner has been called “the Poet Laureate of working people,” having worked all over the country as an iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, bus driver, cab driver, garment laborer, longshoreman, teacher, and librarian. He was also an usher for minor league baseball. His coworkers have had a deep impact on his writing.

Salner is an MFA graduate of the distinguished Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a prize-winning author whose writing has appeared in such noted magazines as Threepenny Review, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, North American Review, and Ploughshares. His novel, A Place to Hide, won first place for historical fiction from Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

His latest, and fifth, poetry collection is Summer Words: New and Selected Poems, out this year from Frankfort-based Broadstone Books. In it he gives voice to stories suspended in memory and history, specifically working-class history, through poems of labor and laborers still in pursuit of dreams, of the mines and mills and farms and forests where he has worked and of those he met along the way, a mosaic of an America where he has “gotten crazy / in towns that no longer exist.” These poems are themselves the product of dedicated labor, precise in their workmanship and attention to detail.  More than anything, there is a real affection in these pages, for the dignity of work and the satisfaction at the end of a hard day.

Salner lives in Millsboro, Delaware with his wife, Barbara Greenway.