April is Poetry Month, so give a listen: Three local poets who’ve just won 2016 Hawaii literary awards will read from their work in back-to-back sessions on Saturday at the Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival.

The winners of this year’s Eliot Cades Awards for Literature from the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council are Brenda Kwon, author of “The Sum of Breathing,” published by Bamboo Ridge Press, and Susan M. Schultz, author of “Memory Cards: Thomas Traherne Series.”

In 1995 Schultz founded Tinfish Press, which publishes experimental poetry. One of the unnamed prose poems in her collection concerns the death of a cat. It reads, in part, “Still each window frames his gaze. Yesterday, he lurched to the lanai, wanting out. Bryant carried him to the flower pot that holds rain water. He set his left paw in it, put his head between dense leaves, drank.”

Kwon’s collection from Bamboo Ridge includes short fiction, memoir and spoken word as well as poems. Her poem “Ashes” has an elemental subject: “And when the storm came, it felt no regret—/the division temporary, a mere transmission/before, meeting the sea,/it became whole again.”

The winner of the Bamboo Ridge Issue No. 108 Editors’ Choice Award for Poetry is Carol Catanzariti. In her poem “Surfer” she writes, “Gravity does not exist for him./Yet, he knows it is the waves/that are immortal/He’s seen what they can do.”

On Saturday, Catanzariti will read at 11 a.m. with her fellow editors’ choice winners, and Kwon and Schultz will read at noon (see info box, right, for details). Schultz will also read on Sunday at 3 p.m. with Tinfish authors Timothy Dyke and Joseph Han.

Come hear these poets read their works in full, and experience how words can place us in nature’s thrall.