John Olivares Espinoza

Rusty Morrison

September 11, 2009:

Opening Poet: George Stenger. Santa Rosa poet, George Stenger, has had poems published in the anthology Present at the Creation, and in Intersection, the journal for the Guild for Psychological Studies.

John Olivares Espinoza and Rusty Morrison

John Olivares Espinoza's first book of poetry, The Date Fruit Elegies, was the inaugural publication of Bilingual Press’s new series, Canto Cosas. The book was a 2009 nominee for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Espinoza is the son of Mexican parents who settled in the densely working-class parts of Southern California where he and his brothers worked as landscapers with his father in the resort towns. Espinoza holds degrees in creative writing from UC Riverside (B.A.) and Arizona State University (M.F.A.). He has been a resident of the South Bay for five years..

Rusty Morrison'sthe true keeps calm biding its story won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Northern California Book Award, and the Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Prize.Whethering won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Poetry Society of America's George Bogin (09), Alice Fay DiCastagnola (07), Cecil Hemley (06), and Robert H. Winner (03) Memorial Awards, as well as the 2008 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank, the University of Montana's literary magazine.  She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing (www.omnidawn.com).

Rebecca Foust

Devorah Major

Opal Palmer

Donna Emerson

October 16, 2009:

Opening Poet: TBD

Rebecca Foust, Daughters of Yam (devorah major, Opal Palmer Adisa), Donna Emerson

Rebecca Foust’s book, all that gorgeous pitiless song, won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Book Award and will be released next year, and her books, Dark Card (Texas Review Press 2008) and Mom’s Canoe (TRP 2009) won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Prizes.  Her recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in Hudson Review, Los Angeles Review, Margie, North American Review, Spoon River and elsewhere and has received awards and distinctions including two 2008 Pushcart nominations and International Publication Prizes from Atlanta Review in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Daughters of Yam -- Poet and writer Opal Palmer Adisa and former San Francisco Poet Laureate devorah major -- have performed at Lincoln Center Outdoors Festival, San Francisco Jazz Festival, Yoshi's, Brava, Oakland Ensemble Theater and many other clubs, theaters and community centers.  They have published a book, "Traveling Women" and two full length poetry and jazz recordings, "Fierce//Love"  and "The Tongue is a Drum."   In a harmonic blending of voices, they lift poetry off the page yet preserve the integrity of language. They continue in the tradition of the African Griot (storyteller and historian) who gave birth to the Last Poets, Jayne Cortez and Sonia Sanchez, et al.

Daughters of Yam performs poetry, which is cultural, social and political centering on the reality of being of African descent, women, mothers, lovers, human beings in today's world.

Donna Emerson is a college instructor, licensed clinical social worker, photographer, and writer of poetry and prose. Recent poetry publications include California Quarterly, The South Carolina Poetry Review, Phoebe, and So To Speak, among many others. Recent prose publications include Stone Canoe, Tiny Lights, Crone, and Passager. Her latest award was “Best of the Best” from the California State Poetry Society in December, 2008.Her second chapbook, Body Rhymes, was selected by Finishing Line Press, for publication in May 2009.

Chad Sweeney

October 30, 2009:

Opening Poet: TBD

Chad Sweeney and Thomas Centolella

Chad Sweeney is the author of three books of poetry, Parable of Hide and Seek (Alice James, 2010, Beatrice Hawley Award Runner-up), Arranging the Blaze (Anhinga, 2009), and An Architecture (BlazeVOX, 2007) and editor of Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights Books, 2009).  Sweeney’s work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior, Runes, Verse, Volt, Barrow Street, American Letters & Commentary and elsewhere.  He is coeditor of Parthenon West Review and is working toward a Ph.D. in literature at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where he teaches poetry and serves as assistant editor of New Issues Press.

Thomas Centolella is the author of three books of poetry, all from Copper Canyon Press. His latest is Views from along the Middle Way. Others include Terra Firma, selected by Denise Levertov for the 1990 National Poetry Series, and Lights & Mysteries, which received the 1996 Poetry Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California. In 1992 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Mr. Centolella was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the College of Marin California, and in the California Poets in the Schools Program. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared twice on Garrison Keillor's NPR show The Writers Almanac.

Lynne Knight

Carolyn Miller

November 6, 2009:

Opening Poet: TBD

Lynne Knight and Carolyn Miller

Lynne Knight is the author of four full-length collections, the most recent of which is Again, published by Sixteen Rivers Press this year. Dissolving Borders won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize in 1996; The Book of Common Betrayals won the Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press in 2002; and Night in the Shape of a Mirror was published by David Robert Books in 2006. She has also published three prize-winning chapbooks. A cycle of poems on Impressionist winter painting, Snow Effects, appeared from Small Poetry Press as part of its Select Poets Series and has been translated into French by Nicole Courtet.

Carolyn Miller's most recent collection, Light, Moving is the twentieth book to be published by Sixteen Rivers Press. Her first standard collection of poetry, After Cocteau, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2002. Two letter-press limited-edition books of poems, This Is Mine (2005) and Constant Lover (2001), have been published by Protean Press. Her poetry has received the James Boatwright Award for Poetry from Shenandoah, and the Rainmaker Award from Zone 3.

Cecilia Woloch

Carol Muske_Dukes

November 13, 2009:

Opening Poet: Nancy Norton. Norton's poetry has appeared in Susan B & Me, a book of women's writing and photography, The Linnet's wings; Mirror Magazine Online. She has poems forthcoming in CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and The Comstock Review

Cecilia Woloch and Carol Muske-Dukes

Cecilia Woloch was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up there and in rural Kentucky, one of seven children of a homemaker and an airplane mechanic. She is the author of four award-winning collections of poems: Sacrifice, a BookSense 76 Selection in 2001; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem; Late, for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in 2004; and Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press Snowbound Prize for the chapbook in 2006. A fifth collection of poems, entitled Carpathia, is slated for publication by BOA Editions in 2009.  Maxine Kumin says of Cecilia Woloch's poetry: "To write movingly about love in an era infused with hate requires a special gift: nostalgia hard-edged with realism. She has that gift."

A celebrated teacher, Ms. Woloch has conducted poetry workshops for thousands of children and young people throughout the United States and around the world, as well as workshops for professional writers, educators, participants in Elderhostel programs for senior citizens, inmates at a prison for the criminally insane, and residents at a shelter for homeless women and their children. She has served on the faculties of a number of graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs, and since 2006 has been a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California.  She is the founding director of Summer Poetry in Idyllwild and of The Paris Poetry Workshop. Her poems have been translated into French, German and Polish, and recent prose has been published in Ukrainian. She spends a part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles and Idyllwild, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Shepherdsville, Kentucky; Paris, France; and a small village in the Carpathian mountains of southeastern Poland.

California State Poet Laureate Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Sparrow, a National Book Award finalist published by Random House. Her three novels are Life After Death, Random House (2001), Saving St. Germ, Penguin (1993) and Dear Digby, Viking (1989).Her fourth novel Channeling Mark Twain from Random House is in stores now.

Carol's collection of essays entitled Married to the Icepick Killer, A Poet in Hollywood was published in August of 2002. Her collection of reviews and critical essays, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography and the Shape of the Self was published in the "Poets on Poetry" series of the University of Michigan Press, 1997.She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review. Her work appears everywhere from the New Yorker to L.A. Magazine and she is anthologized widely, including in Best American Poems, 100 Great Poems by Women and many others.

Muske-Dukes is professor of English and Creative Writing and founding Director of the new PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She has received many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Ingram-Merrill, the Witter Bynner award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes.