WordTemple Poetry Series
at COPPERFIELD'S BOOKS Santa Rosa, California
FALL 2007 READINGS -- 7:00 p.m. at Copperfield's Books in Santa Rosa, California
|
Francisco Alarcón and Francisco Aragón Francisco Alarcón, Chicano poet and educator, is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including, From the Other Side of Night / Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press 2002), Sonetos a la locura y otras penas / Sonnets to Madness and Other Misfortunes (Creative Arts Book Company 2001), No Golden Gate for Us (Pennywhistle Press 1993), Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation(Chronicle Books 1992), De amor oscuro / Of Dark Love (Moving Parts Press 1991, and 2001), Body in Flames / Cuerpo en llamas (Chronicle Books l990). His most recent book of bilingual poetry for children titled, Poems to Dream Together / Poemas para soñar juntos, was published by Lee & Low Books, New York in Spring 2005, and was awarded the 2006 Jane Addams Honor Book Award. Francisco has been a recipient of the Danforth and Fulbright fellowships, and has been awarded several literary prizes, including the 1998 Carlos Pellicer-Robert Frost Poetry Honor Award by the Third Binational Border Poetry Contest, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, 1993 American Book Award, the 1993 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the 1984 Chicano Literary Prize. In April 2002 he received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association (BABRA) in San Francisco. He was one of the three finalists nominated for the state poet laureate of California last year. Francisco Aragón - A native of San Francisco and long-time resident of Spain, Francisco Aragón is the author of, Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press) and editor of the anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press). In the area of literary translation (from the Spanish), he has published a number of poetry books, including three by Francisco X. Alarcón: Body in Flames, (Chronicle Books), Of Dark Love (Moving Parts Press) and Sonnets to Madness and other Misfortunes (Creative Arts Book Company). Aragón will be a writer-in-residence at the Anderson Center for Interdiscplinary Studies in Red Wing Minnesota during the month of September 2007. He has lived in northern Indiana since 2001. |
||
|
Carolyn Kizer and Eloise Klein Healy Carolyn Kizer received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her collection of poems, Yin, in 1984, and the 1988 Theodore Roethke Award. She was a fellow of the Chinese Government in Comparative Literature at Columbia University and was the first director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts, a member of the board of the Academy of American Poets, and has been a poet-in-residence at Columbia, Stanford and Princeton, among others. Her book, Cool, Calm & Collected -- Poems 1960 - 2000 was published by Copper Canyon Press.
Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry and three spoken word recordings. She was the founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles where she is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing Emerita. Healy directed the Women’s Studies Program at California State University Northridge and taught in the Feminist Studio Workshop at The Woman’s Building in Los Angeles. She is Resident Poet at the Idyllwild Summer Poetry Festival, the co-founder of ECO-ARTS, an eco-tourism/arts venture, and founding editor of ARKTOI BOOKS, an imprint of Red Hen Press. Her latest collection of poems is The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho. | ||
|
D.A. Powell and Sam Witt D.A. Powell's most recent collection, Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004) was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award, the PEN West Award, the Publisher's Triangle Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleaides, Smartish Pace and Colorado Review. He received Sonoma State University's Distinguished Alumnist Award and teaches at University of San Francisco.
Sam Witt's first book of poetry, Everlasting Quail, won the Katherine Nason Bakeless First Book Prize in 2000, sponsored by Breadloaf. Everlasting Quail was published by UPNE the following year, and he received a Fulbright Fellowship to live and write in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Witt has participated in poetry festivals at Druskininkai and Vilnius at the invitation of the Lithuanian government; he has been a resident at the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and at Yaddo; his poems have been published in Virginia Quarterly, Harvard Review, Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, among other journals. His second book, Sunflower Brother, won the Cleveland State University Press Open Book competition for 2006; it is available from Cleveland State University Press. Witt will be teaching at Whitman College for the 2007-2008 academic year.
|
||
|
Lynne Knight and Forrest Hamer Opening poet: Greg Mahrer, whose work as appeared in many journals including The New England Review and Crazyhorse. Lynn Knight is the author of three full-length collections, Dissolving Borders, which won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize in 1996; The Book of Common Betrayals, which won the Dorothy Brunsman Award from Bear Star Press in 2002; and Night in the Shape of a Mirror, published by David Robert Books in 2006. She has also published three prize-winning chapbooks, Deer in Berkeley (Sow’s Ear Press), Life as Weather (Two Rivers Review), and Defying the Flat Surface (The Ledge Press). A cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects, appeared from Small Poetry Press as part of its Select Poets Series and is being translated into French by Nicole Courtet. She lives in Berkeley, California. More of her work can be seen at www.lynneknight.com. Forrest Hamer is the author of Call & Response (Alice James, 1995), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award; Middle Ear (Roundhouse, 2000), winner of the Northern California Book Award; and Rift (Four Way Books, 2007). His work is widely anthologized, and appears in three editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the California Arts Council and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and he has taught on the poetry faculty of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops.
|
||
|
Colleen McElroy and Jimmy Santiago Baca Colleen J. McElroy – poet, prose writer and folklorist – is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Travelling Music; What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, Bone Flames and her newly released collection Sleeping With the Moon. McElroy is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine The Seattle Review. She has lectured on poetry and American literature throughout the world, and her research into poetry and oral tradition has taken her to Europe, Central and South America, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, Africa, Japan, Australia, China, Tibet, and Jordan. Her work has been translated into ten languages, including Russian and Italian. She lives in Seattle, Washington. Jimmy Santiago Baca – poet, novelist, and author of the award winning memoir, A Place To Stand, will be reading from his new collection of poems, Spring Along the Rio Grande (New Directions, 2007). Born in New Mexico of Indio-Mexican descent, Jimmy Santiago Baca was raised first by his grandmother and later sent to an orphanage. A runaway at age 13, it was after Baca was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison that he began to turn his life around: he learned to read and write and unearthed a voracious passion for poetry. During a fateful conflict with another inmate, Jimmy was shaken by the voices of Neruda and Lorca, and made a choice that would alter his destiny. Instead of becoming a hardened criminal, he emerged from prison a writer. Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country. In 2005 he created Cedar Tree Inc., a nonprofit foundation that works to give people of all walks of life the opportunity to become educated and improve their lives. He is the recipient of over a dozen awards. | ||
|
|||
