January 26, 2005
Calvin Forbes and B.H. Fairchild

Calvin Forbes was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended the New School for Social Research, Rutgers University, and received an M.F.A. from Brown University. His books of poetry include The Shine Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), From the Book of Shine (1979), and Blue Monday (1974). His poems have appeared in many journals and can be found in anthologies such as A Century in Two Decades: A Burning Deck Anthology, 1961-81 (1982) and New Black Voices (1972). His honors and awards include fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and a Fullbright overseas teaching grant. He has taught at Tufts, Howard, American University, the University of Copenhagen, the University of the West Indies and elsewhere. He has read his poetry in venues in this country and abroad. Forbes is also an essayist and writes on jazz and blues history. He is Chairman of the Writing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he teaches poetry, literature, and jazz history.

B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. He attended the University of Tulsa and University of Kansas, working part-time as technical writer for a nitroglycerin plant and English tutor to the Kansas basketball team. The Arrival of the Future was his first full-length book of poems, originally published by Swallow’s Tale Press in 1985 and republished in a new edition by Alice James Books in 2000. His third book, The Art of the Lathe, won the 1996 Capricorn Award and the Beatrice Hawley Award at Alice James Books in 1997, and was subsequently a Finalist for the National Book Award, also receiving the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, the California Book Award, the Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Honorable Mention for the Poet’s Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poems of 2000.  He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation and is the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. In 2001 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize for  “consistent excellence over a long career.”  Fairchild’s latest book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, appeared from Norton in November, 2002, and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, and the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award. A new edition of his second book, Local Knowledge, will be published by Norton in Fall, 2005.

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February 23, 2005
Dorothy Barresi and Connie Voisine

Dorothy Barresi is the author of three books of poetry, Rouge Pulp (2002), The Post-Rapture Diner (1996), winner of an American Book Award, and All of the Above (1991), winner of the Barnard College New Women Poets Prize. Her poems and essay-reviews have been widely published, appearing or forthcoming in Antioch Review, Poetry, Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Pool, and Ploughshares, among others. Her poetry has also been included in numerous anthologies, including The Extraordinary Wave: Contemporary American Women Poets (Columbia Univ. Press, 2000), and Three Genres (Prentice Hall, 2002). Her awards in poetry include two Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Emily Clark Balch Poetry Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Poetry Festival Poetry Award, Grand Prize (judged by Tom Lux), and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge, and she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and sons.

Connie Voisine, is an assistant professor of English at New Mexico State University. She teaches in and serves as director of their MFA program. Her book, Cathedral of the North, was selected winner of the AWP Publication Award and was released by University of Pittsburgh Press in January 2001. Her poems have been published in Bellingham Review, Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, The Bloomsbury Review and Georgia Review. She just completed her second book, Dangerous for Girls.

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The Casa Romantica Reading Series will host a benefit dinner and evening of poetry and the arts on Friday, April 29th at 6:00 pm at the Casa Romantica Cultural Center and Gardens in San Clemente. The event will include dinner, a poetry reading, the West Coast premier of art songs, and an art exhibition and sale. Funds raised will support the year-old reading series. The series holds admission-free poetry readings given by nationally-known poets, the last Wednesday of each month at the Casa Romantica.

The benefit will feature a reading by poet Charles Harper Webb. Baritone John Huntington and pianist Catherine Tibbitts will perform the West Coast premier of art songs by composers Lori Laitman and Beth Anderson. Villas and Verandas Fine Art Gallery of San Juan Capistrano will host an exhibit and sale of paintings by artists Robin Hall, Frank Serrano, and Sabrina Jansen.

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Lorene Delany-Ullman is a native Californian, and received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine in June 2003. She has been published in Elixir, Crab Creek Review, Washington Square, Identitytheory, Perihelion, and has work forthcoming in Vermillion Literary Project. She was the managing editor for Faultline, Volume 12, UC Irvine’s literary journal. She currently teaches literature at Chapman University.   

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Sarah Maclay's poems, reviews and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Field, Pool, Hotel Amerika, Lyric, ZZYZYVA, Solo, The Writer's Chronicle and other journals including Poetry International, where she currently serves as book review editor. Her debut full-length collection, Whore, won the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and she has received a Pushcart nomination. A native of Montana, she currently lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches writing and conducts workshops, most recently at USC, FIDM, privately, and at Beyond Baroque.

Maurya Simon is the author of The Enchanted Room and Days of Awe (Copper Canyon Press, 1986, 1989), Speaking in Tongues (Gibbs Smith, 1990), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and The Golden Labyrinth (Univ. of Missouri Press, 1995). Her fifth volume, A Brief History of Punctuation, was a limited edition, fine letter-press book published by Sutton Hoo Press in 2002. Simon’s sixth volume, Ghost Orchid was published by Red Hen Press in April 2004 and nominated for a 2004 National Book Award in Poetry. Simon is the recipient of a 2002 Visiting Artist Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, a 1999-2000 NEA Fellowship in poetry, a University Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Celia B. Wagner and Lucille Medwick Memorial Awards from the Poetry Society of America, and a Fulbright/Indo-American Fellowship in Bangalore, South India. Simon has been a fellow at Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, and at the Baltic Centre for Writer and Translators in Visby, Sweden, as well as a lecturer at Lund University in Sweden. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorke, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, Agni, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, the New England Review, and in more than forty anthologies. Simon teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside and serves as an Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research for UCR’s College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. She lives in the Angeles National Forest of the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California.

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Colette LaBouff Atkinson's nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Points of Entry, River Teeth, Santa Monica Review, Seneca Review, Small Spiral Notebook, and Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her poetry has recently appeared in Exquisite Corpse, and Caketrain. She is a founding committee member of the Casa Romantica Poetry Reading Series and is currently Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation in the School of Humanities at UC Irvine.

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Molly Bendall is the author of three books of poems, most recently Ariadne’s Island from Miami University Press. She has received the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine, the Lynda Hull Poetry Award from Denver Quarterly, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems, reviews, and translations of the French surrealist poet, Joyce Mansour, have appeared in many journals
including American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Volt, Field, and New American Writing. She teaches in Los Angeles at University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University, and UCLA extension.

Catherine Daly has published two poetry collections in 2003: Locket, from Tupelo Press, and the trilogy DaDaDa, from SALT Publishing. She received an MFA from Columbia University in 1991. An applications architect for fifteen years, she created systems for Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, space shuttle orbiter engineers (a consortium of NASA/ Boeing/United Space Alliance (USA)), the U.S. Navy (NRaD, Navy Research and Development), SONY, and Universal. She created and taught the first online poetry workshops at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in addition to critical theory, women’s studies, and literature courses at UCLA Extension, Antioch LA, West LA College, LA Southwest College, etc. and has been teaching on and off since an undergraduate teacher’s assistantship in the History of Mathematics.

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Cecilia Woloch is the author of Sacrifice (Cahuenga Press 1997) which was a BookSense 76 selection in 2001 ; Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem (Cahuenga Press 2002); and Late, (BOA Editions 2003) for which she was named Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for 2004. She has taught creative writing to children, young people and adults for over 18 years, in venues and institutions throughout the United States and Europe, ranging from public schools and universities to prisons and hospital. She spends part of each year traveling and teaching in Europe, and directs the Paris Poetry Workshop in Paris, France, each spring.

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Prix de Rome Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

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Marvin Bell's poetry has been part of the conversation for four decades. He is the creator of what are known as the "Dead Man" and “Dead Man Resurrected” poems, and has been called “an insider who thinks like an outsider” and "ambitious without pretension." Bell's latest books are Rampant and Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000. Rampant was named poetry book of the year by Library Journal, and the long poem that completes the book was awarded the Shestack Prize by the American Poetry Review. A longtime faculty member at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he leads an annual Urban Teachers Workshop for the inner city program "America SCORES," collaborates with composers, musicians, filmmakers and dancers, and teaches for two low-residency MFA programs housed in the Northwest. From 2000 to 2004, Mr. Bell served as Iowa's first poet laureate. He lives in Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington.

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