Julia B. Levine

Julia B. Levine and Joseph Millar

26 FEBRUARY 2026 — thursday

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Julia B. Levine, Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction, and Joseph Millar, Shine, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).


The featured books will be available at the reading and on bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Julia B. Levine's new book is Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction, winner of the Wolfson Press Poetry Chapbook Prize. Traci Brimhall says, "Lullaby for the Sixth Extinction is an album of moments, a testament to a family's love in the face of pediatric oncology. These poems distill so many days and memories down to their most particular bright and painful details: the lavender fields, the hallways full of ghosts and origami cranes, the family huddled around a crib as if warming their hands by a fire. Levine astonished me poem after poem by refusing easy answers and predictable comforts.…Every line woke up a new corner of my heart."
Her previous books include Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, Northern California Book Award-winner in Poetry; her fifth collection, Ordinary Psalms, won a Nautilus Silver Award. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Terrain Poetry Prize, The Southern Review's Oran Robert Perry Burke Award, and the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work in building climate change resiliency in teenagers. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Nation, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Joseph Millar's recent poetry collection is Shine. David St. John says, "The difficult grace of dailiness and the defiant resilience of the spirit have always been at the heart of Millar's poetry. Book by book, line by carefully carved line, Millar has been writing the finest poetry about work and material presence in our world since those of his exemplar, Philip Levine." His previous poetry collections include Overtime, finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Fortune; Blue Rust; Kingdom; and Dark Harvest, New and Selected Poems. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. His work has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in Pacific University's low residency program and lives in Richmond, California.