 |
|||||||||||
| Mission Statement In the space between Los Angeles and San Diego lies a vibrant poetry community. We want to both promote and celebrate the many poets living and writing here, as well as expose the denizens of Orange County to additional poets of national and international stature. We feel it is our responsibility to reach out to those who are comfortable with poetry and those who have not had the door of poetry opened to them, by offering the best poetry of Southern California and beyond in a setting both historic and beautiful: the Casa Romantica Cultural Center Gardens. The poets we invite to read at our monthly readings have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, among other honors. In addition to our monthly readings, we offer workshops in poetry, fiction and nonfiction for various age groups. All of our readings are free and open to the public. Committee Members
Founding Committee Members Emeritus Colette LaBouff Atkinson Committee Member Biographies
|
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 the 1993, 1995, 1997 and 2005
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 is married and the mother of two sons, and lives
in San Clemente.
Chris
Davidson grew up in San Clemente before receiving his
BA from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and his MFA from the UC Irvine.
He is Assistant Professor of English at Biola University, where
he directs the freshmen composition program and teaches creative
writing. His poems have appeared in Dust Up, the
Alaska Quarterly Review, the Cimarron Review,
Caesura, and Orange Coast Review.
Lorene
Delany-Ullman is a native Californian, and received
her B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine.
She has been published in Elixir, Crab Creek Review,
and Washington Square, Identitytheory.com,
Perihelion, Versal, Colere, and Upstreet.
She was the managing editor for Faultline, UC Irvine’s
literary journal. She currently teaches composition and poetry
at UC Irvine.
Michelle
Greenwood was born in 1960 in Lakewood, California.
A Southern California native, Michelle was as drawn to the characters
in her childhood books as she was to the beautiful coastal area.
She was educated at the University of California at Berkeley
and is a Financial Advisor with Zuk Financial Group in Lake
Forest, California and an Investment Advisor Representative
(IAR) for National Planning Corporation. Still an avid reader,
Michelle is thrilled to have an ongoing opportunity to work
with the Casa Romantica Reading Group. 
Michelle
Mitchell-Foust is the author of two volumes of poetry,
Circassian Girl (Elixir Press, 2001), winner of the
Elixir Press Poetry Prize, and Imago Mundi (Elixir
Press, 2005), and two fine press chapbooks, Poets at Seven
(Sutton Hoo Press) and Exile (Sangha Press). She
is a winner of the NATION/”Discovery’ Award, the
Columbia Poetry Prize, a Writers at Work Fellowship, an Academy
of American Poets Award, and the Missouri Arts Council Biennial
Award. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The
Washington Post, Antioch Review, and Colorado
Review, among other magazines and anthologies. She received
her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
She has edited several literary and scholarly journals, including
The Missouri Review and Oral Tradition. She
is working on a graduate degree in mathematics education at
the University of California-Irvine, and she teaches writing
at Chapman University. She lives in California with her husband
Kevin, a 2005 and 2006 Class Champion in the Porsche Owners’
Club Short Track Racing Series, and their dog Koni.
Vernon
Ng was born in 1984 in San Diego, California, and received
his B.A. and M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine.
He has been awarded a Gerard
Creative Writing Fellowship and a UCI Humanities Research Grant.
He lives in Chula Vista.
Elisa
Pulido received her MFA at The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. Her poetry has been published in The New Welsh
Review and Interchange in the UK, and in ACM,
Margie, The North American Review, River
Styx, and The Ledge in the US. She resides in
San Juan Capistrano.
Patty
Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical
Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic
(Helicon Nine Editions, 1998) which won the 1997 Marianne
Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association’s
Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous
journals including The Paris Review, New England
Review, Field, Slate, Crazyhorse,
Cutbank, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review,
Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, Third
Coast and Western Humanities Review. Seyburn grew
up in Detroit, earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern
University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California,
Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University
of Houston. She is an Assistant Professor at California State
University, Long Beach and co-editor of POOL: A Journal
of Poetry, based in Los Angeles. She lives with her husband,
Eric Little, and their two children, Sydney (6) and Will (4).