Award-winning poet and essayist Gary Holthaus and internationally acclaimed musician Lauren Pelon will team up to offer a unique new program called “The Story of Music, Stories from Home” at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday in the Frank W. Bridges Theatre at Riverland Community College.

Pelon plays a variety of ancient and modern instruments ranging from lute, lyre, and concertina, to recorders, gemshorn, electric wind controller and pedalboard. Holthaus reads from his poems and essays. Both the music and the readings offer unique perceptions of the natural world, and celebrate our sense of place, community and home.

Pelon has performed throughout the U.S. and in China, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Australia, and New Zealand. She is noted for her versatile use of a diverse array of instruments, but has also won recognition for her soprano voice, and her compelling compositions and arrangements of music from many countries and cultures.

Pelon has performed with symphony orchestras, The Philadelphia String Quartet, on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” and at the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia. She was the recipient of the 2001 Artist of the Year award from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, and 2010 Artist Initiative Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Holthaus has three books of poems, three chapbooks, and three collections of essays, all of them rooted in the earth and the idea of community or home. Holthaus’ poems have been published in the U.S., Egypt, and Iraq (in Arabic).