Poetry Readings + Visual Art

Readings by Saint Paul poets Greg Watson, Clarence White, and Carla Hagen with visual art contributed by residents and artists of the Lowertown Lofts Artist Cooperative

Greg Watson is an award-winning poet native to Saint Paul with twelve published poetry collections. In his latest manuscript The Shape of Your Absence, Greg offers a poignant exploration of love, loss, and the echoes that linger after departure. With quiet precision and emotional clarity, Watson transforms absence into a living presence—something that shapes, rather than empties, the heart. 

Clarence White is a writer, editor, typewriter poet, curator, teacher, figure skater, and arts administrator. His publications are included in several editions of the Saint Paul Almanac, Suisun Valley Review, The Cortland Review, and Public Art Review, and his essay “Smart Enough for Ford” appears in the anthology Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota.

Carla Hagen is an author, poet, radio-show host and retired attorney. She recently released the second novel in her Minnesota-Canadian Borderland Trilogy series, Muskeg.  Carla’s debut novel, Hand Me Down My Walking Cane, won the 2012 Midwest Independent Publishers Awards for best literary fiction and best historical fiction.