St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron has planned several free events to celebrate the release in April of the 54th edition of Patterns, a literary and arts publication featuring student work.

Patterns is the longest continually published community college literary and arts magazine in the state.

This year's guest authors are novelist Jaimy Gordon and poet John Rybicki.

The following Patterns events are scheduled:

• 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, April 21 — Choose from a Fiction Writing Workshop with guest author Jaimy Gordon or a Poetry Writing Workshop with guest author John Rybicki. Both events will be at Studio 1219, 1219 Military St., Port Huron.
• 4 to 5 p.m. Saturday, April 21 — Guest authors will be available for an informal gathering and discussion of writing at Studio 1219. Light refreshments will be served.
• 2 to 6 p.m. Sunday, April 22 — A reception is planned in the college's Fine Arts Theatre to honor the SC4 student writers and artists. Selections of their work will be read or displayed. A social hour with hors d'oeuvres will follow in the College Center Atrium with a reading of their own works by the guest authors. Copies of Patterns will be available.
• April 22 to May 4 — An art show in the college's Fine Arts Galleries will highlight work from student artists featured in Patterns and selected works by sophomore student artists. Galleries are open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday. The galleries also will be open during the reception Sunday, April 22.

Gordon's Lord of Misrule won the National Book Award in 2010, as well as the Tony Ryan Award for the year's best book about horse racing. It was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, 2011. Gordon is the author of three previous novels, Shamp of the City-Solo, She Drove Without Stopping and Bogeywoman, which was on the Los Angeles Times' list of Best Fiction of 2000. Gordon has been a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and the Bunting (now Radcliffe) Institute at Harvard University. She received an Academy-Institute Award for her fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991. Born in Baltimore, she lives in Kalamazoo and teaches at Western Michigan University and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

Rybicki's latest collection, Who Can Say What Sea, will be published in winter 2012. One poem from the collection received a Pushcart Prize. His earlier works include We Bed Down Into Water, Yellow Haired Girl with Spider and Traveling at High Speeds. His work has been featured in The Best American Poetry anthologies, Poetry, Ploughshares, Paris Review, The American Poetry Review, North American Review and Field. Rybicki lectures regularly at Haverford College, Kalamazoo College, Swathmore College, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Hope College and Sarah Lawrence College. He also teaches poetry writing to inner-city children in Detroit and works with "Wings of Hope" Hospice teaching poetry writing to children who have been through a trauma or loss. His work in Detroit garnered him an appearance in Time Magazine for Kids, which featured him as an outstanding writing teacher.

Production of Patterns and the Patterns events are made possible by financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts, St. Clair County Community College and SC4 Friends of the Arts.

For more information, call (810) 989-5767 or visit www.sc4.edu/patterns.

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