Annette Langlois Grunseth and Tori Grant Welhouse will share poems from their recent books, Summer Days at the Five and Dime and Pading Loamy on Brew of Earth respectively, and discuss how memories and memory fragments, such as a look, smell, taste, place, or feeling can spark poems. Participants will be able to try writing prompts and exercises designed to bring their own 'shards of memory' into consciousness and transform them into poetry. 

Annette Langlois Grunseth  is retired from a career in healthcare marketing and public relations. She received the 2022 Hal Gruetzmacher Prize for poetry and a 2022 Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America for her book, Combat and Campus: Writing Through War, a biography of her brother’s Vietnam War letters and her concurrent year at UW-Madison during the antiwar protests. She earned a Pushcart prize nomination with her book Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family’s Journey of Gender Transition. Her third book is a memoir in poetry — Summer Days at the Five and Dime, released in May 2026.

Tori Grant Welhouse is a Wisconsin poet and writer. Her newest poetry chapbook is Padding Loamy on a Brew of Earth from Bottlecap Press. Her other chapbooks include Vaginas Need Air with Etchings Press (winner of their 2020 chapbook contest), and Canned with Finishling Line Press. She has also published a YA fantasy novel, The Fergus , with Skyrocket Press (winner of their inaugural novel-writing contest). She has been published in Arlington Literary Journal and Passionfruit Review, among many other publications. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.