Linda Watanabe McFerrin

Jacqueline Berger and Linda Watanabe McFerrin

14 NOVEMBER 2024 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Jacqueline Berger, Left at the Ruin, and Linda Watanabe McFerrin, Post-Apocalyptic Valentine, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).


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Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Jacqueline Berger's new book of poems is Left at the Ruin. Mark Wunderlich says "This is a book that understands poetic power lies in ambiguity and not in moral certainty, and shows us the unique power of poetic language to help us understand ourselves" Her previous collections include The Day You Miss Your Exit; The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Things That Burn, winner of the Agha Shadid Ali Poetry Prize, and The Mythologies of Danger, winner of the Bluestem Award and Bay Area Book Reviewers Award (now the Northern California Book Award). Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies including American Poetry: The Next Generation. Her work has appeared in Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, Nimrod, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, California, and lives on the California Central Coast.

Poet, travel writer, novelist and editor Linda Watanabe McFerrin's new book of poems is Post-Apocalyptic Valentine. Cole Swensen says "…these are poems that listen even more loudly than they speak, and that generosity gives this collection its distinctively heart-felt edge—it's a tour de force of compassion." Linda Watanabe McFerrin's previous collections include Dead Love, a novel, which won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction; The Hand of Buddha, a short story collection; and Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose. She co-edited Hot Flashes, the sexy little stories & poems series of anthologies. McFerrin has judged the San Francisco Literary Awards, Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and Kiriyama Prize. She served as a visiting mentor for the Loft Mentor Series, and has been guest faculty at the Oklahoma Arts Institute. Founder of Left Coast Writers, she has led workshops in around the world and across the United States.