January 28, 2009
Stephanie Brown and Colette LaBouff Atkinson
Stephanie Brown was born in 1961 in Pasadena, California and grew up in Newport Beach. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Iowa, and Boston University. She is the author of Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1998) and Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). She received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Among other publications, she has published over forty poems in American Poetry Review since 1988, appeared on the March/April 2005 and July/August 1996 issue covers, and won the magazine's Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Award in 1994. Her poems were selected for four editions of the The Best American Poetry (Scribner’s). Her poetry and essays have been included in many recent anthologies such as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner’s, 2003) and The Grand Permission: Essays on Poetry and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). She has made her living as a public librarian since 1989 and is currently a Senior Branch Manager for the Orange County Public Library system. She has taught creative writing at the University of California, Irvine and at the University of Redlands. She is married and the mother of two sons, and lives in San Clemente.

Colette Labouff Atkinson's prose has appeared in the following: Orange Coast Magazine, Seneca Review, River Teeth, Santa Monica Review, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Babble, and elsewhere. She is the author of Mean, a collection of prose poems (University of Chicago Press). She has recently taught in the literary journalism program at UC Irvine and last spring taught poetry workshops at Pitzer College. She is Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine, and she lives in Southern California.

March 25, 2009
Bob Cowser, Jr. and Marilyn Nelson
Bob Cowser, Jr.'s first book, Dream Season, published in 2004 by the Atlantic Monthly Press, was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and "Paperback Row" selection and was listed among the Chronicle of Higher Education's best-ever college sports books. It garnered further praise in Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and on NPR's "Only a Game." His second book, Scorekeeping, a collection of coming-of-age essays, was published in October 2006 by the University of South Carolina Press. He is at work on a third book about the 1979 murder of one of his grade school classmates and the execution of her killer in 2000, the first execution in Tennessee in 40 years. He graduated summa cum laude from Loyola-New Orleans in 1992 with majors in English and Print Journalism, then earned a Master's in English at Marquette University in 1994 and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Nebraska in 1998. An Academy of American Poets prizewinner and Pushcart Prize nominee, Cowser's work has appeared widely in American literary magazines, including the Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Brevity, Sonora Review and Creative Nonfiction. He is Associate Professor of English at St. Lawrence University, where he teaches courses in nonfiction writing and later American literature, and an adjunct member of the faculty of Ashland University's Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts program. He also serves as associate editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative. Cowser lives on the Grasse River in Canton, NY with his wife, Candace, and their sons Jackson and Mason.

Poet Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks. Her book The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award and was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award. The Fields Of Praise: New And Selected Poems won the 1998 Poets' Prize and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Award, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. Carver: A Life In Poems won the 2001 Boston Globe/Hornbook Award and the Flora Stieglitz Straus Award, was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, a Newbery Honor Book, and a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Fortune’s Bones was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book and won the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry. A Wreath For Emmett Till won the 2005 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and was a 2006 Coretta Scott King Honor Book, a 2006 Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and a 2006 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award Honor Book. The Cachoiera Tales And Other Poems won the L.E. Phillabaum Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, the 1990 Connecticut Arts Award, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, and a fellowship from the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut; founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony; and was Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Friday, May 1, 2009
Fifth Annual Benefit
Carol Muske-Dukes and John Hoskinson
To benefit the Casa Romantica Reading Series

Carol Muske-Dukes has just been named the Poet Laureate of California. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Sparrow, a National Book Award finalist published by Random House in 2003, and An Octave about Thunder and New and Selected Poems. Her three novels are Life after Death (Random House, 2001), Saving St. Germ (Penguin, 1993), Dear Digby (Viking, 1989), and most recently Channeling Mark Twain (Random House, 2008). Her collection of essays Married to the Icepick Killer, A Poet in Hollywood was published in 2002. Her collection of reviews and critical essays Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self was published by University of Michigan Press in 1997. Both non-fiction collections have been "New York Times Most Notable Books" or the current year's "Best Books". She is a regular critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Books Review. She has won a number of awards, among them The Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram-Merrill, the Witter Byner Award from the Library of Congress, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America, and several Pushcart Prizes. She is a 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.

John Hoskinson is a singer/songwriter raised in California’s Inland Empire as the only boy amongst 6 sisters. Hoskinson trained his ear on the bright Britpop of The Beatles and Elvis Costello and the blissed-out sunshine of The Beach Boys. He's released several CDs, most recently Pancho Fantastico. His music can be heard at http://myspace.com/johnhoskinson.

May 27, 2009
Tony Barnstone and Kate Durbin
Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English Language and Literature at Whittier College. His books of poems include The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008, winner, Benjamin Saltman Award); Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to the chapbook Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 2007); The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry (Anchor, 2005); Out of the Howling Storm: The New Chinese Poetry (Wesleyan, 1993); Laughing Lost in the Mountains: Poems of Wang Wei (UP of New England, 1991); The Art of Writing: Teachings of the Chinese Masters (Shambhala, 1996); and the textbooks Literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America, Literatures of Asia, and Literatures of the Middle East (all from Prentice Hall Publishers). Among his awards are a fellowship from the NEA, a fellowship from the California Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and 1st place in in the 2008 Strokestown International Poetry Prize. His new book of poems, Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, won the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry, and will be published by BKMK Press in 2009.

Kate Durbin's forthcoming collection of poetry, The Ravenous Audience, was selected by Chris Abani for the Black Goat Press imprint of Akashic Books. She has a chapbook, Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator's Boot, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California in Riverside, and her poems have appeared in various journals, including Drunken Boat, elimae, diode, and Boxcar Poetry Review. She lives in Whittier.

June 7, 2009 (Sunday) at 11:00 a.m.
Free and open to the public
Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease
Five Southern California poets will read from the new anthology, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer's Disease.

Alzheimer's disease is now estimated to affect one in two person over the age of eighty and is being diagnosed in people as young as fifty. For the many people now trying to cope with a loved one suffering from this tragic disease, this collection will provide solace and valuable insight for family members as well as for those in the medical community who work with anyone afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. Beyond Forgetting is a unique collection of poetry and short prose about Alzheimer's disease written by 100 contemporary writers-doctors, nurses, social workers, hospice workers, daughters, sons, wives, and husbands-whose lives have been touched by the disease.

Richard Beban author of the poetry books, What the Heart Weighs (Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2004) and Young Girl Eating a Bird (Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2006), turned to poetry in 1993 after spending more than 30 years as a journalist, and then a television and screenwriter. Beban's poetry has appeared in more than 50 periodicals and literary Websites, and in 17 national anthologies in the US and Britain, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has been a featured reader at more than 150 venues, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Berkeley's late, lamented Cody's Books, and Shakespeare & Company in Paris, France. Beban, his wife (poet and novelist Kaaren Kitchell), and three other poets organized and ran one of Los Angeles' most successful weekly reading series, at Venice's Rose Café from 1997 to early 2000.

Lorene Delany-Ullman is a native Californian, and received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. She formerly worked as a technical writer for both a major aircraft company and a marketing research firm. She has been published most recently in Perihelion, Versal, Upstreet, Harpur Palate and has work forthcoming in Iguana Review and MO: Writings from the River. She was the managing editor for Faultline, Volume 12, UC Irvine's literary journal. She currently teaches composition and poetry at UC Irvine. She is also one of the founding members of the Casa Romantica Reading Series in San Clemente, California.

Judy Kronenfeld is the author of two books and two chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, which was published in Summer, 2008. Her poems, as well as the occasional short story and personal essay have appeared in numerous print and online journals. Recent poem credits include Natural Bridge, The American Poetry Journal, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Calyx, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Pedestal and The Cimarron Review, as well as a number of anthologies including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young (Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008). Judy Kronenfeld is also the author of a critical study: KING LEAR and the Naked Truth (Duke U.P., 1998). She has taught for 25 years in the Department of Creative Writing, at the University of California, Riverside.

Melanie Martin earned her M.F.A. in poetry from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where she was also awarded a scholarship to spend her final semester in Galway, Ireland. Her poems have been published in magazines such as Southeastern Review, River Oak Review and Crab Orchard Review. She is currently working on writing a novel and resides in Long Beach, California, where she teaches English at Long Beach City College and Orange Coast College.

Candace Pearson is preoccupied with the issues of memory, accountability and the natural world. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been published in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Cider Press Review, PoemMemoirStory, Kalliope, 5AM and other fine journals. Her full-length manuscript was a finalist for the 2008 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. She lives in the Los Angeles hills.

October 28, 2009
Alicia Ostriker and Lynne Thompson
Alicia Ostriker is a major American poet and critic. Twice nominated for a National Book Award, she is author of eleven volumes of poetry, most recently No Heaven (2005). As a critic Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking volumes on women’s poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Her most recent critical book is Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic. She has also published three books on the Bible, Feminist Revision and the Bible, the controversial The Nakedness of the Fathers; Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of prose and poetry that re-imagines the Bible from the perspective of a contemporary Jewish woman, and most recently, For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book. Ostriker’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antaeus, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS, Tikkun, and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized. Her poetry and essays have been translated into French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew and Arabic. She has lectured and given performances of her work throughout the USA, as well as in Europe, Australia, Israel, Japan and China. Ostriker has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of Am erica, the San Francisco State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Princeton, NJ with her husband. Ostriker is Professor Emerita of Rutgers University and is a faculty member of the New England College Low-Residency Poetry MFA Program. Ostriker has taught in the Princeton University Creative Writing Program and in Toni Morrison’s Atelier Program. She has taught midrash writing workshops in the USA, Israel, England and Australia.

Lynne Thompson won the 2007 Perugia Press Book Prize for her first full-length collection of poems, Beg No Pardon. Beg No Pardon was also awarded the 2008 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. A frequent reader, both locally and nationally, Thompson is also the author of two chapbooks: We Arrive By Accumulation and Through A Window and her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Essence, Margie, Crab Orchard Review, Indiana Review, and Blue Arc West, An Anthology of California Poets. She is employed as the Director of Employee & Labor Relations at UCLA.