Sonoma Word Participant New Way Media author Michelle Baynes will be hosting a Homeless In Petaluma reading as part of the fall 2009 Sonoma Word Festival. Date to be announced. Michelle Baynes has worked with the homeless in Petaluma, California for years. In this book she reveals, with straightforward candor, what she’s seen and heard on the streets and under the bridges. We hear the voices of the forgotten and forsaken, and in the startling black and white photographs we see the frayed edges of a town not unlike every small town in the United States. Tough, heartbreaking, compassionate and true, Baynes is our witness to the struggles of these citizens’ daily lives. Through her eyes, the people who live on our spare change are no longer invisible.—Dorianne Laux