August Bonk! Series To Be Held At Eco Justice Center

RACINE, WI — This month’s BONK! performance series will be held on Saturday, August 12th, at 6:00 p.m. with doors opening at 5:30. Featured performers will be: small town poet and essayist, Tom Montag; Wisconsin poet and publisher, Angie Trudell Vasquez; and Kenosha indie Americana band, Kai Andersen and The Pickups.

This month’s event will be held at the Eco-Justice Center, 7133 Michna Road, Racine, WI. The Racine Dominican Eco-Justice Center is dedicated to environmental education and care of Earth in a context of Community, Contemplation,Creativity and Cultivation.

Created to expose the public to both local and nationally recognized artistic talents, the BONK!
series showcases poets, writers, musicians, filmmakers and all sorts of talent in between.
Founded in fall of 2008, the BONK! series has been running with an event every month for over
eight years now. A completely free program, BONK! aims to have its events at a different
location in Racine every month to help introduce people to the many amazing businesses, venues
and historic institutions throughout the county.

Tom Montag, a poet and essayist from Fairwater WI, is the author of the memoir
CURLEW:HOME and the poetry collections MIDDLE GROUND, THE BIG BOOK OF BEN
ZEN, and IN THIS PLACE: COLLECTED POEMS 1982-2013. His other books of prose
include KISSING POETRY'S SISTER and THE IDEA OF THE LOCAL. In 1982, Montag and
his wife Mary founded the WISCONSIN POETS' CALENDAR, which they edited and
published for three years. His poem "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain" was
incorporated into the design of the Convention Center in Milwaukee, along with the work of 50
other Wisconsin writers. With David Graham, he is editing an anthology of poetry about
American small towns.

Angie Trudell Vasquez received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts
in May 2017. In 2016, she was a poetry panelist at Split This Rock! Her poems have been
published most recently in the Yellow Medicine Review, Raven Chronicles, the San Diego
Poetry Annual 2015-2016, Subtle Forces and Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters. She
has work forthcoming in the Taos Journal of Poetry and Cloudthroat. Her short stories have
appeared most recently in Rumpus online and Basta! 100+ Latina Against Gender Violence. She
was nominated for a Pushcart in 2014 for her essay, "The Making of the Latina Monologues."
She was the featured poet for the Latina Monologues from 2009 to 2011. She has her own press,
Art Night Books, and will resume publishing other people’s work in 2018. She has been working
with the ACLU of Wisconsin since 2005 and developed their youth poetry program.

Kai Andersen and The Pickups are an Americana indie rock band from Kenosha WI. Along
with the front man of the self-titled group, the band also features Patrick Greer. They have been
featured on stages in New York, New Jersey, Texas, Georgia, Arizona and all over the Midwest.
The band released an EP, called Part 1, this past February — a collection of five songs that have
an “overriding love theme with a twist.” Part 2 is slated to be released this fall.

BONK! is made possible by the The Racine Public Library, the Osborne and Scekic Family
Foundation, the Friends of the Racine Public Library, Olympia Brown Universalist Unitarian
Church, Olde Madrid restaurant and an Artseed grant from The Racine Arts Council. For more
information or to view video of past BONK! performances please visit
http://bonkperformanceseries.w... .