WordTemple Poetry Series
at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS Santa Rosa, California
SPRING 2008 READINGS -- 7:00 p.m. at Copperfield's Books in Santa Rosa, California
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Al Young and The WordWind Chorus Al Young – California's Poet Laureate, has sung and played the blues, drawn inspiration from the blues, and has incorporated the blues and blues stylings into his poetry. Come celebrate the release of his new book Something About the Blues -- An Unlikely Collection of Poetry. The book comes with a CD containing over 60 minutes of dynamic blues poetry, often with a live band, and a recording of Langston Hughes reading "The Weary Blues." WordWind Chorus is an ensemble of performing writers. q.r. hand, jr., a native New Yorker, is the author of i speak to the poet in man, and his work has appeared in many journals as well as two seminal anthologies, Black Fire and Outlaw Poets. Brian Auerbach hails from Atlanta, by way of Philadelphia, and has written about jazz for several publications. He is the author of ear to the heart. Saxophonist, poet and playwright Lewis Jordan, from Chicago, has performed as a member of United Front and with bassist Mark Izu in a duet format. His recording (with Izu) is Travels of a Zen Baptist. He's the author of the acclaimed play And Time Will Take You Out. A mainstay of the Black Arts Movement in the Bay Area, Reginald Lockett’s work has appeared in over 30 anthologies and periodicals. He has authored three books of poetry. Working together in words and music, wordWind chorus plays an urban based world poetry sound reaching from the personal to the cosmos, from around the corner to around the world. Whether talking about love or history or just hangin’ out, the sound vibrates out of the streets, nightclubs and communities sometimes in struggle. These sounds mean, and mean to mean.
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Terry Ehret and Gillian Wegener Come celebrate the release of two new books published by Sixteen Rivers Press! Terry Ehret is one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press. Literary awards for her previous collections, Lost Body and Translations from the Human Language, include the National Poetry Series, the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award, and the Nimrod/ Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. From 2004-2006, she served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, California College of the Arts, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with the California Poets in the Schools Program. She currently leads private workshops in Sonoma County, California, where she lives with her family. Lucky Break is her third book of poem Gillian Wegener has had poems published in numerous journals, including Runes, English Journal, americas review, and In the Grove. A chapbook, Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other was published by In the Grove Press in 2001, and she was awarded a top prize by the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation for 2006. Wegener works as a junior high English teacher in California’s Central Valley. She lives with her husband and daughter in Modesto. | ||
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Nickole Brown and Judy Grahn Nickole Brown is the author of Sister, published by Red Hen in September 2007. She has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and the Kentucky Arts Council. She studied English Literature at Oxford University as an English Speaking Union Scholar, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. Her work has been featured in The Writer's Chronicle, Poets & Writers, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, Diagram Magazine, Another Chicago Magazine, Mammoth Books' Sudden Stories anthology, and Starcherone Press anthology PP / FF. She also co-edited the anthology, Air Fare: Stories, Poems, & Essays on Flight. She has served as the National Publicity Consultant for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and as the Program Coordinator for the Union Institute & University writing residency in Slovenia. Nickole has worked at Louisville’s nonprofit, independent, literary press, Sarabande Books for eight years. Judy Grahn, author of Another Mother Tongue; The Queen of Wands; A Woman is Talking To Death; and other collections, is a lifetime activist and artist, whose work has been foundational to more than one social movement in the US and internationally, including G/L/B/T and Women’s Spirituality. As a poet and social theorist, her work has been widely published, distributed, anthologized, staged, and put to music. She teaches creative arts and women’s spirituality, and is Research Faculty for Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Spring of 2008 Red Hen Press intends to publish love belongs to those who do the feeling, a collection of her short poems, some of which she performs with singer/songwriter Anne Carol. A CD is in recording stage. Also, Judy edits and publishes her own essays in Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture (Metaformia.org).
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Rose Black and Joseph Zaccardi Rose Black, the author of Clearing, has a passion for the prose poem, a form which works well for her and seems to illuminate her voice. Poet Moira Magneson describes Black's poems as a canoe ride on a quiet lake, interrupted by a sudden, sometimes deadly, squall. David St. John calls Black “a remarkable and heart-breaking poet.” Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Runes, South Carolina Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Spillway and Slant. Fairfax poet, Joseph Zaccardi, reads from his collection Vents, a book Margaret Kaufman says "floats like a 'flotilla of dragonflies' over the hard situations of life." Zaccardi's poems have been published in many journals including Runes and Seattle Review. He is the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Marin Arts Council.
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Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Albert Flynn DeSilver Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of THE FORTUNATE ISLANDS (Marick Press 207). Other works include the chapbooks A CAMELLIA FOR JUDY FEATHER’S HAND, TO A SMALL MOTH, Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s GREATEST HITS, THE LAND and a letterpress collection, THE BOOK OF INSECTS. Her new chapbook, CASSIOPEIA ABOVE THE BANYAN TREE appears online as Mudlark 33 and was released in an expanded print version from Rattlesnake Press in 2007. Over the years she has worked as a freelance writer and poetry columnist for the Sacramento Bee and Sacramento Union, as the editor of the on-line journal Perihelion and the print journal Quercus; she has been a California Poet-in-the-Schools, the program director of an arts program for homeless women, an educator, and an artist in the prisons. She lives in Sacramento, California, where she is an editor of Swan Scythe Press, an exhibiting visual artist and an instructor the University of California, Davis Extension. She recently completed her second collection of poems, GHOSTFIRE. Albert Flynn DeSilver is the author, most recently of Letters to Early Street, Summer 2007 from La Alameda/University of New Mexico Press, and Walking Tooth & Cloud from French Connection Press in Paris, January 2007. He has published more than one hundred poems in literary journals worldwide including Zyzzyva, New American Writing, Jacket (Australia), Poetry Kanto (Japan), Van Gogh’s Ear (France), Hanging Loose, Exquisite Corpse, and many others. He is also the editor and publisher of The Owl Press, publishing innovative poetry and poetic collaboration. He is now the CEO/Director of Visiting Angels, a Senior Homecare agency in Santa Rosa, California. | ||
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