ForImmediate Release Contact: City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com GerdaSaunders and Jennifer Tonge to readat City Art Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch 210 East 400 South Salt Lake City UT 84111 Wednesday April 5th, 7:00—8:00 P.M. Writer Gerda Saunders and Poet Jennifer Tonge will read from theirworks on Wednesday, April 5th at 7:00 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Public Libraryas part of the City Art Reading Series. This event is free and open to thepublic. GERDA SAUNDERS: In 2010, just before her sixty-first birthday, former literatureprofessor Gerda Saunders was diagnosed with microvascular disease, the secondleading cause of dementia after Alzheimer’s. At Saunders’ early retirementparty, her colleagues presented her with a beautiful leather-bound journal.Facing “the premature death of the mind,” she took to jotting down notes in thejournal about her daily misadventures– pots boiling dry on the stove, washingher hair twice in an hour, forgetting to bake a casserole. She would come tocall these scribblings her “Dementia Field Notes.” Saunders became an anthropologist assigned to observe one memberof a strange tribe, the Dementers. “Like a true scientist,” she writes, “Iwould be objective. No whining, wailing, or gnashing of the teeth. Just thefacts.” The result of Saunders’ extraordinary project – a sort of true-life“Sill Alice” – is MEMORY’S LAST BREATH: Field Notes on My Dementia (HachetteBooks, June 13, 2017), an unsparing, beautifully written memoir about Gerda’sexperience as an intellectual person aware that her brain is betraying her.MEMORY’S LAST BREATH is uncharted territory in the writing about dementia, adiagnosis one in nine Americans will ultimately receive. Gerda Saunders grew up inSouth Africa, where she obtained a B.S. from the University of Pretoria. In1984, she settled in Utah with her husband Peter and two children. Afterreceiving an English PhD from the University of Utah in 1996, she suffered thecorporate world before becoming the Associate Director of Gender Studies at heralma mater, also teaching gender studies and English. SMU Press published herstories Blessings on the Sheep Dog (2002), about which Nobel laureate J.M.Coetzee said, “With cool intelligence, laconic wit, and deep feeling, Saundersexplores the moral chaos of South Africa and the pain of a new generationof…exiles.” Now retired, she enjoys time with her husband Peter, children,grandchildren, and made-in-America family. She is writing a memoir, Telling WhoI Am before I Forget: My Dementia. An excerpt from the memo was published inthe Winter 2013 edition of The Georgia Review and in March 2014 republishedonline in Slate Magazine and the UK Independent. Jennifer Tonge’s poems haveappeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New England Review, Denver Quarterly, andelsewhere, and on Poetry Daily. She has received the Jay C. and RuthHalls Fellowship in Poetry from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, aWork-study Scholarship and the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry from theBread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, TheVirginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, and The DjerassiResident Artists Program. She has served as poetry editor of QuarterlyWest, as president of Writers at Work, and on the board of City Art. Most featuredreadings are followed by an open reading. The event is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah ArtsCouncil, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, andaudience donations. Joel Long