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January
30, 2008
Karen An-hwei Lee and Pamela McClure
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of
In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of
the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber First Book
Award. Her chapbook, God's One Hundred Promises (2002),
received the Swan Scythe Press Prize. Two new collections,
Ardor and Erythropoiesis, are forthcoming
from Tupelo Press. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, she
lives and teaches on the West Coast, where she is a novice
harpist.
Pamela McClure holds a Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.
She is the author of Rock Dove (Red Dragon Fly Press)
and has two limited edition, fine press chapbooks from Sutton-Hoo
press, Sweet Geometry and Blood Lily. Her
work has appeared in Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner,
The Colorado Review and other magazines and her work
has been awarded an Academy of American Poets prize. She has
recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Pamela McClure
teaches Creative Writing at Columbia College in Missouri.
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February
27, 2008
Geoff Bouvier and Jeffrey Harrison
Geoff Bouvier's first book, Living Room, was selected
by Heather McHugh as the winner of the 2005 APR/Honickman Prize.
His writings have appeared in American Poetry Review,
Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, jubilat,
New American Writing, Western Humanities Review,
and VOLT. He received an MFA from Bard College's Milton
Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 1997. He lives in San Diego,
where he waits tables at Tapenade Restaurant, and publishes
journalistic prose for The San Diego Reader.
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of four full-length books of
poetry-- The Singing Underneath (1988), a National
Poetry Series selection, Signs of Arrival (1996), Feeding
the Fire (Sarabande Books, 2001), and Incomplete Knowledge,
(Four Way Books, 2006)-- as well as of The Names of Things:
New and Selected Poems, published in England by the Waywiser
Press in June 2006. His chapbook An Undertaking, came
out in 2005. He has received fellowships from the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for
the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the Amy Lowell Traveling
Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the
Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in The
New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review,
Poetry, The Yale Review, Poets of the
New Century, and in many other magazines and anthologies.
He has taught at several universities and schools, including
George Washington University, Phillips Academy, where he was
the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence, and College of the Holy
Cross. He is currently on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA
Program at the University of Southern Maine. |
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March 26,
2008
Wang Ping and Daniel Tiffany
Wang
Ping was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in
the East China Sea. After three years of farming in a mountain
village, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left
China to study in the U.S., earning her Ph.D. from New York
University. Her books include two collections of poetry, The
Magic Whip and Of Flesh & Spirit, the cultural
study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, the
novel Foreign Devil, two collections of fiction stories
entitled American Visa and The Last Communist
Virgin, and a book of Chinese folk lore, The Dragon
Emperor. Her books have been translated into German (Foreign
Devil) and Dutch and Japanese (American Visa).
Wang is also the editor and co-translator of the anthology
New Generation: Poetry from China Today and co-translator
of Flames by Xue Di. The Magic Whip was
a 2004 finalist for the Minnesota Book Award and received
an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book
Award, and Aching for Beauty was a 2001 Minnesota
Book Award finalist and winner of the University of Colorado's
Eugene M. Kayden Book Award for "the best book in the humanities
published by an American university press." Her writing has
appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The
Best American Poetry 1993 and 1996. She is a
recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the
Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Minnesota State
Arts Board, the Loft Career Initiative, and Bush Foundation,
and she was a recipient of the Lannan Residency Program in
2007. She now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and teaches creative
writing at Macalester College. Her current research is on
China's globalization and modernization, and she debuted in
2007 as a photographer and filmmaker with an exhibit on the
impact of the Three Gorges Dam, entitled Behind the Gate.
Daniel Tiffany's first book of poetry, Puppet Wardrobe,
appeared in 2006 from Parlor Press. He has published translations
of works by Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet,
Cesare Pavese. His critical works include Toy Medium:
Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California
Press, 2000), named one of the "Best Books of 2000" by the
Los Angeles Times Book Review. His poetry, which
has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in many
journals, including Tin House, Boston Review,
Volt, The Germ, Colorado Review,
Denver Quarterly, and the Paris Review.
He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi
Foundation in France and been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship.
His most recent poetry project, "The Dandelion Clock," was
set to music by the composer Daniel Rothman and installed
at the Interface New Music Festival in Berlin in 2007. He
lives in Venice, California and teaches at the University
of Southern California.
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Wednesday,
April 30, 2008 at 7:00 pm
Kay Ryan and Barrett Johnson
Fire with Icicles: An Evening of Poetry
and Music
Fourth Annual Benefit
To benefit the Casa Romantica Reading Series
Wine, light dinner, and silent auction; $75 per person
For information or reservations please call 949.498.2139, ext
10
Kay Ryan's sixth book of poems, The Niagara River,
was published in 2005 by Grove Press. In 2006 she was elected
a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her previous
books include Say Uncle (2000), and Elephant Rocks
(1996), also from the Grove Press Poetry Series. Her book Flamingo
Watching, Copper Beech (1995) was a finalist for both the
Lamont Book Award and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. She
was born in California in 1945 and grew up in the small towns
of the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert. She received
a BA and MA from UCLA. Since l971 she has lived in Marin County.
Her awards include the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (The Poetry Foundation),
a Guggenheim fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Award, an NEA Fellowship,
the Union League Poetry Prize (Poetry Magazine), the Maurice
English Poetry Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the Commonwealth
Club of California, and four Pushcart Prizes. Ms. Ryan's work
has been selected four times for The Best American Poetry
and was included in The Best of the Best American Poetry
1988-1997. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New
Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The
Yale Review, Paris Review, The American Scholar,
The Threepenny Review, Parnassus, and many
other journals and anthologies. Entertainment Weekly
has named her to their "It List"; her work has been used in
the Sunday funnies; and one of her poems has been permanently
installed at New York's Central Park Zoo.
Barrett Johnson is an Orange-based singer-songwriter whose musical
influences include Tom Waits and Django Reinhardt and whose
literary influences include John Fante and Knut Hamsun. His
first CD, In Case I Went Missing, is released April 2008. |
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May
28, 2008
David J. Morris and Brian Turner
Dave Morris is the author of Storm on the Horizon:
Khafji-The Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War
(Free Press). He has covered the war in Iraq for Salon.com
and the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2003. Dave
has also worked in a television factory, as a rock climbing
guide, a bike messenger, a photographer, a college teacher and
a Marine infantry officer. His work has appeared in the Los
Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, Etiqueta Negra,
Rock & Ice, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading
2007. He is a regular radio and television guest on The
History Channel, The Jim Lehrer Newshour and the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Background Briefing."
In December 2007, he was awarded a fellowship in creative nonfiction
from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the
University of California at Irvine.
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here,
Bullet won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New
York Times "Editor's Choice" selection, the 2006 Pen Center
USA "Best in the West" award, the 2006 Northern California Book
Award in Poetry, and the 2006 Maine Literary Award in Poetry.
Turner has also received a Lannan Literary Fellowship and an
NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. Turner served seven years
in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader
in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry
Division. Turner's poetry has been published in Poetry Daily,
The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the
Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction
with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. He
earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad
in South Korea. |
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May
29, 2008
David J. Morris – Nonfiction Workshop
Real
Writing: The Freedom of Sticking to the Facts
read more about this workshop here
Dave Morris is the author of Storm on the Horizon: Khafji-The
Battle that Changed the Course of the Gulf War (Free Press).
He has covered the war in Iraq for Salon.com and the
Virginia Quarterly Review since 2003. Dave has also
worked in a television factory, as a rock climbing guide, a
bike messenger, a photographer, a college teacher and a Marine
infantry officer. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles
Times, Der Spiegel, Etiqueta Negra, Rock
& Ice, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007.
He is a regular radio and television guest on The History
Channel, The Jim Lehrer Newshour and the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation's "Background Briefing." In December
2007, he was awarded a fellowship in creative nonfiction from
the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the University
of California at Irvine. |
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June
25, 2008
Marilyn Chin and J. Mark Smith
Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland,
Oregon. She is the author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
(W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), The Phoenix Gone, The
Terrace Empty (1994), and Dwarf Bamboo (1987).
Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including ones
from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received a
Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart
Prizes, the Paterson Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan,
as well as residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan
Residency, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her work has been featured
in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology
of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Introduction
to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American
Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat,
and The Best American Poetry of l996. She was featured
in Bill Moyers' PBS series The Language of Life. She
has read and taught workshops all over the world. Recently,
she taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop and was guest poet
at universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney
and Berlin and elsewhere. In addition to writing poetry, she
has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and
co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. Presently,
she is writing a book of poetic tales. She co-directs the MFA
program at San Diego State University.
J. Mark Smith was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1965, and moved
with his family to western Canada when he was ten months old.
He has published one book of poems — Notes for a
Rescue Narrative (Oolichan, 2007). He teaches in the English
department at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta. |
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July
30, 2008
Angie Estes and Kathy Fagan
Angie Estes is the author of three books of poems, most
recently Chez Nous (Oberlin College Press, 2005). Her
second book, Voice-Over (2002), won the FIELD
Poetry Prize and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from Poetry
Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion
(1995), received the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. She has received
fellowships in poetry from the NEA, the NEH, the Woodrow Wilson
Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council,
and was awarded a 2005 Pushcart Prize. Recent poems have appeared
in TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares,
FIELD, Boston Review, Shenandoah,
Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Slate, and
Green Mountains Review, and in the anthologies Gondola
Signore Gondola: Venice in 20th Century American Poetry;
Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality;
The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women;
and The Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of
Place.
Kathy Fagan is the author of the National Poetry Series selection
The Raft (Dutton, 1985), the Vassar Miller Prize winner
Moving & St Rage (University of North Texas, 1999),
and The Charm (Zoo, 2002). Her work has appeared in
The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Slate,
Field, Ploughshares, and The Missouri
Review, among other literary magazines, and is anthologized
in Under 35 (Doubleday, 1989), Extraordinary Tide:
New Poetry by American Women (Columbia, 2001), American
Diaspora (Iowa, 2001), The Breath of Parted Lips: Poems
from the Robert Frost Place (CavanKerry, 2001), and, most
recently, Poet's Choice (Harcourt, 2006), edited by
Edward Hirsch. Fagan is the recipient of fellowships from the
Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts,
Ohioana, and the Ohio Arts Council. Formerly the Director of
Creative Writing at The Ohio State University, she is currently
Professor of English and Editor of The Journal. |
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August
27, 2008
Denise Hamilton
Denise Hamilton writes the Eve Diamond series and is
editor of Los Angeles Noir, (2007) an anthology of
new writing that spent four weeks on the Southern California
bestseller lists. Her books have been shortlisted for the Edgar,
Macavity, Anthony and Willa Cather awards. Her debut The
Jasmine Trade was also a finalist for the prestigious Creasey
Dagger Award given by the UK Crime Writers Assn. Hamilton's
books have been BookSense 76 picks and Mystery Guild alternate
selections. The Los Angeles Times named Last Lullaby
a "Best Book of 2004" and it was also a USA Today Summer Pick
and a finalist for a Southern California Booksellers Association
2004 award. Savage Garden and Prisoner of Memory
were L.A. Times Bestsellers and were short-listed for
the So. Ca. Booksellers Assn award for "Best Mystery" of the
year. Prior to writing novels, Hamilton was a Los Angeles
Times staff writer. Her award-winning stories have also
appeared in Wired, Cosmopolitan, Der Spiegel
and New Times. During the Bosnian War, Hamilton lived
and taught in Yugoslavia as a Fulbright Scholar. She lives in
the Los Angeles suburbs with her husband and two boys. |
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September
24, 2008
Elliot Fried and Bill Mohr
Born in St. Louis, MO, Elliot Fried moved to California
at the age of reason and has lived there ever since. After a
brief stint as a deputy probation officer for Santa Cruz County,
he received his MFA from U.C. Irvine and began teaching at California
State University, Long Beach, where he is now Professor Emeritus.
His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines and anthologies,
including A Geography of Poets and Stand Up Poetry.
His collections include Picking Up The Pieces, The
Man Who Owned Cars and Marvel Mystery Oil. Garrison
Keillor has read his poetry on National Public Radio. He has
edited three poetry anthologies: Amorotica, Men
Talk, and Gridlock. He is founder and director
of the Long Beach Poetry Festival, a week-long series of community
events, currently in its tenth successful season. An avid pilot
and motorcyclist, he lives with his wife, Helen, and three dachshunds
in Apple Valley.
Bill Mohr has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California
San Diego, and is currently an assistant professor at California
State University, Long Beach. His poems, prose poems, creative
prose, reviews, and literary criticism have appeared in dozens
of magazines, including ZYZZYVA, 5 AM, William
Carlos Williams Review, Chicago Review, Sonora
Review, Blue Mesa Review, Antioch Review,
New Review of Literature, Askew, Beyond
Baroque Magazine, and Santa Monica Review. His
writing has also appeared in many anthologies, including Stand
Up Poetry, Grand Passion, Bear Flag Republic,
and AutoBioDiversity. His first full-length collection,
Hidden Proofs, was published in 1982. A compact disc,
Vehemence, was released by New Alliance Records in
1993. His most recent collection is Bittersweet Kaleidoscope
(If Editions). |
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October
29, 2008
Sandra Alcosser and Christopher Buckley
Sandra Alcosser has published seven books of poetry,
including A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except
by Nature, which have been selected for the National Poetry
Series, the Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award,
the Larry Levis Award, the Associated Writing Programs Award
in Poetry, and the William Stafford Award from Pacific Northwest
Booksellers. She is the National Endowment for the Arts' first
Conservation Poet for the Wildlife Conservation Society and
Poets House, New York, as well as Montana's first poet laureate
and the 2006 recipient of the Merriam Award for Distinguished
Contribution to Montana Literature. She founded and directs
the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego
State University each fall, and has directed SDSU's International
Writers Summer Program at National University of Ireland, Galway
for three summers. In addition she is, or has been, a member
of the faculty at University of Michigan, University of Montana,
and Pacific University and a writer-in-residence in Glacier
National Park, Yosemite National Park and Central Park, New
York. She received two individual artist fellowships from NEA,
and her poems have appeared in The New York Times,
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry
and the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
Christopher Buckley's most recent book is And the Sea,
published by The Sheep Meadow Press, 2006. Sheep Meadow Press
also published his thirteenth book of poetry, Sky,
in 2004. His first book of creative nonfiction, Cruising
State: Growing up in Southern California was published
in 1994, and a new book of nonfiction, Sleep Walk,
is out from Eastern Washington University Press, 2006. With
Gary Young Buckley, he is the editor of The Geography of
Home: California's Poetry of Place (Hey Day Books, 1999),
and with David Oliveira and M.L. Williams, he is editor of How
Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (The Round House Press, 2001).
For the University of Michigan Press's Under Discussion series,
he has edited The Poetry of Phillip Levine: Stranger to
Nothing, 1991. Over the last twenty-five years, his poetry
has appeared in literary journals such as APR, Poetry,
Field, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review,
TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares,
The New Yorker, The Nation, The Hudson
Review, The Gettysburg Review, Quarterly West,
Prairie Schooner, and New Letters, among others.
He has received a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing to the
former Yugoslavia, four Pushcart Prizes, two awards from the
Poetry Society of America, and is the recipient of NEA grants
in poetry for 2001 and 1984. He teaches Creative Writing Program
at the University of California, Riverside. |
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November
19, 2008
Jane Hirschfield
Jane Hirshfield is the author of six collections of poetry,
including After (which was shortlisted for England's
T.S. Eliot Prize, nominated for the Northern California Book
Award in Poetry, and also chosen as one of the best books of
2006 by the Washington Post, the San Francisco
Chronicle, and the London Financial Times), Given
Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book
Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers
Award), The Lives of the Heart, and The October
Palace, as well as a book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering
the Mind of Poetry. She also edited and co-translated The
Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women
of the Ancient Court of Japan, Women in Praise of the
Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, and
Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems. Hirshfield's other honors
include The Poetry Center Book Award; fellowships from the Guggenheim
and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the
Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University's
Translation Center Award; and the Commonwealth Club of California's
Poetry Medal. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,
The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement,
The Nation, The American Poetry Review, Poetry,
five editions of The Best American Poetry, and many
other publications, and has been featured numerous times on
Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac program, as well
as in two Bill Moyers PBS television specials. In fall 2004,
Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for
distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American
Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost,
Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. |
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