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2016 Poetry Flash Reading Series


Poetry Flash readings take place at Moe's Books, Berkeley, and at Diesel, A Bookstore, Oakland.

To find out more about the Poetry Flash Reading Series, please email editor@poetryflash.org or call (510) 525-5476, weekday afternoons. ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be provided for these events with at least one week's notice. To request, email mbb@poetryflash.org, or editor@poetryflash.org. Our reading series venues are wheelchair accessible. Read more about the series on the Poetry Flash Reading Series page.


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14 JANUARY 2016 — thursday

"Stay Amazed" with Susan Felix: Rafael Jesús González, Jack and Adelle Foley, Jerry Ratch, more

Poetry Flash presents the fourth in a series of readings for Stay Amazed, a collection of poems for artist Susan Felix, who will be at the event, contributing readers include Rafael Jesús González, Jack and Adelle Foley, Gary Lapow, Jerry Ratch, Kim McMillon, Avi Duhan, Nancy Schimmel, Zigi Lowenberg, and Joyce Jenkins, sales of the book benefit Poetry Flash, readers will read their particular contribution or on the themes of wonder or amazement, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

In 2013, one year after the death of her husband, poet Morton Felix, acclaimed ceramic artist Susan Duhan Felix, Berkeley's Arts Ambassador, asked friends in her far-flung art and literary circles to write a poem for her birthday.
Thirty friends and family rose to the occasion, from Susan Griffin, poet and nonfiction author, to Al Young, California Poet Laureate emeritus, to novelist Jonathan Lethem, to poets and translators Anita Barrows and John Oliver Simon. The poems were then presented in a series of celebratory events during an exhibition of her artwork at a Berkeley Gallery. Those joyful and spirited readings then inspired more poems, and Stay Amazed was born. This collection also features poems by Morton Felix and Lisa Felix-Smartt, Susan's daughter, with an Introduction by Lisa on the origins of her poems for Morton, her father, and her mother.
The fourth in a series of these readings, contributors will read their particular contribution to the collection or on the theme of wonder or amazement. Susan Duhan Felix will be at the event. Sales of Stay Amazed benefit Poetry Flash.


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21 JANUARY 2016 — thursday

Dan Bellm and Helen Wickes

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and translator Dan Bellm and poet Helen Wickes, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Dan Bellm is both a poet and a translator; his latest translation is Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue, by the Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca, winner of Mexico’s top poetry award, the Aguascalientes Prize. Dan Bellm works from both Spanish and French. He has published three books of his own poetry, most recently Practice, winner of a California Book Award, about which Alicia Suskin Ostriker says, “I am in awe of how Bellm’s poems perform a dance with and against Holy Scripture….Practice is like a long prayer of wonder, gratitude, pain and loss and tenderness.”
Helen Wickes’s new book of poems is World as You Left It. Lloyd Schwartz says, “Such good poems in Helen Wickes’ new collection, poems about memory and loss that skillfully combine the startling poetic image…and exuberant colloquial language….At the heart of World as You Left It are the poems centering on the poet’s late father—both hilarious…and mysterious, as touching as they are enlivening.” Her previous collections are Moon Over Zabriskie and Dowser’s Apprentice, and her first, In Search of Landscape. She is a member of Sixteen Rivers Press, a nonprofit, shared work, small press.


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31 JANUARY 2016 — sunday

Jewelle Gomez, Linda Noel, Kurt Schweigman, Kim Shuck, more

Poetry Flash presents a reading by contributing poets Jewelle Gomez, Sharmagne Leland-St. John, Linda Noel,, Kurt Schweigman, and Kim Shuck to celebrate the new Scarlet Tanager Books anthology, Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry From California, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry From California is a new anthology edited by Kurt Schweigman and Lucille Lang Day, with an introduction by James Luna. Its poets represent twenty-nine different tribes and range from university professors to self-taught poets, some much-published, winners of prestigious awards, some newcomers, including at least one who's being published here for the first time. Co-editor and publisher Lucille Lang Day will introduce the anthology contributors at this event. The contributing poets reading at this launch event are:
Jewelle Gomez, who is Ioway/Wampanoag/Cape Verdean. She grew up in Boston during the simmering times of civil rights, anti-war, American Indian, and lesbian-feminist movements. She has published seven books, including the cult classic vampire novel The Gilda Stories, soon to have a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Her play about James Baldwin premiered in 2011, and her play about singer/composer Alberta Hunter will be produced in 2015.
Sharmagne Leland-St. John, (San Poil), nine-time Pushcart Prize nominee, is a Native American poet, concert performer, lyricist, artist, filmmaker, and store owner. Editor-in-Chief of the poetry e-zine Quill and Parchment, she divides her time between the Hollywood Hills and the Pacific Northwest. She has toured the United States, Canada, and England as a performance poet, has published four books of poetry, Unsung Songs, Silver Tears and Time, Contingencies, and La Kalima, and co-authored a book on film production design. She is co-editor of Cradle Songs: An Anthology of Poems on Motherhood, winner of the International Book Award Honouring Excellence in Mainstream and Independent Publishing.
Linda Noel is of Koyoonk'auwi (Konkow) descent and grew up in Mendocino County. She lives in Ukiah, California, where she is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Ukiah.
Kurt Schweigman, Oglala Lakota, formerly known as Luke Warm Water, was a featured poet at the prestigious Geraldine R. Dodge 12th Biennial Poetry Festival in 2008 and was the first spoken word poet to receive an Archibald Bush Foundation individual artist fellowship in literature. Although no longer competing, he won Poetry Slams from California to Germany. His work was published in Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets, 2008, and his latest book, City Tree of Concrete & Hope, won an Artists Embassy International literary/cultural award.
Kim Shuck, Tsalagi/Sauk/Fox, is a poet and bead artist whose work has been shown in Asia, South America, Europe, and across North America. Raised in San Francisco during the hippy, post-hippy, and Red Power movements of the '60s and '70s, she cut her teeth on poetry readings with Carolee Sanchez, Paula Gunn Allen, John Trudell, and various beat poets. She received the 2005 Diane Deborah Award for her book of poems Smuggling Cherokee. Her latest collection is Clouds Running In.


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14 FEBRUARY 2016 — sunday

Ginger Murchison and Murray Silverstein

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Ginger Murchison, a scrap of linen, a bone, and Murray Silverstein, Master of Leaves, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Ginger Murchison's first full-length book of poems, a scrap of linen, a bone, is the Tom Lombardo Selection for Press 53. David Baker says, "From where she stands in her fine first book of poems, Ginger Murchison can see in many directions—back to Stone Mountain and the earlier generations of her family, forward into the prospective futures of her progeny….Murchison is a gifted lyric poet with a flair for story and character; thus, one by one, her rich, ever-focused poems cohere into an expansive historical document." She founded "Poetry at Tech," Georgia Institute of Technology's poetry program and reading series, with Thomas Lux; she is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire and a consulting faculty member for the annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival.
Murray Silverstein's latest book of poems is Master of Leaves. Dawn McGuire says, "Written by a master architect…these poems scale up and down to reveal hauntingly similar patterns in nature and patterns of human consciousness in nature. Here, language is erotically charged, generative seed of fresh unfolding." His first book of poems is Any Old Wolf. An architect as well as a poet, he is co-author of four books about architecture, including the classic A Pattern Language.


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18 FEBRUARY 2016 — thursday

Charles Entrekin and Gail Rudd Entrekin

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and novelist Charles Entrekin and poet Gail Rudd Entrekin, co-authors of The Art of Healing, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

This reading celebrates The Art of Healing, a new book of poems co-authored by husband and wife, Charles and Gail Rudd Entrekin. The book details a merged double journey, his as a cancer patient, hers as his wife, lover, and caregiver, through each of their poetries. Ellen Bass says, "The Art of Healing is a fitting title for this volume that demonstrates that healing is, indeed, an art. It could also be called 'The Art of Loving' because the love between Charles and Gail is palpable and inspiring. And it could be called 'The Art of Living,' for it contains wise examples of how to be alive to each moment…." Author of five books of poetry and a novel, Red Mountain: Birmingham, Alabama, 1965, Charles Entrekin is the founder of the Creative Writing department at John F. Kennedy University and of the Berkeley Poets Workshop and Press. Currently he is the editor of the e-zine Sisyphus, a journal of literature, culture, and philosophy, and managing editor of Hip Pocket Press. Gail Rudd Entrekin is poetry editor of Hip Pocket Press and editor of the online environmental literary journal Canary. She's published four books of poetry, most recently Rearrangement of the Invisible.


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20 FEBRUARY 2016 — saturday

Poetry Flash Benefit: A Cavalcade of Poets!

Poetry Flash Benefit: : A Cavalcade of Poets! features brief readings by Richard Silberg, Mk Chavez, Nadine Lockhart, Bill Mayer, Gerald Fleming, Lynne Knight, Judy Halebsky, John Oliver Simon, Jack and Adelle Foley, John Shoptaw, Brynn Saito, Al Young, Julie Rogers, and David Meltzer, with refreshments, Mythos Fine Art Gallery, 1790 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, 3:00-6:00 (https://www.facebook.com/events/822148794597985/)

Some of the Bay Area's finest poets, all friends and associates of Poetry Flash, will be getting together for a reading to celebrate and support the Flash with the richness and excitement of their poetry, what, indeed, it's all about. Come join us at Mythos Gallery, drop in and out as your pleasure moves you, and take part in this delightful event! Support Poetry Flash and help keep the inspiration flowing.
In order of appearance, with two intermissions, reading for ten minutes each: Richard Silberg, Mk Chavez, Nadine Lockhart, Bill Mayer, Gerald Fleming, Lynne Knight, Judy Halebsky, John Oliver Simon, Jack and Adelle Foley, John Shoptaw, Brynn Saito, Al Young, Julie Rogers, and David Meltzer.


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25 FEBRUARY 2016 — thursday

Patricia Caspers and Annie Stenzel

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Patricia Caspers and Annie Stenzel, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Patricia Caspers's debut book of poems is In the Belly of the Albatross. Noted Berkeley poet Chana Bloch says, "In these moving poems, many of them dramatic monologues spoken by women, Patricia Caspers conjures up the lives of historical individuals…She also draws on her own experiences as girl, woman, wife and mother…Patricia Caspers' poems flourish and grow by turning themselves undaunted to the light." Currently a reporter for the Auburn Journal, she has an MFA from Mills College, is the founding editor of West Trestle Review and poetry editor for Prick of the Spindle. Among her honors is the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Award for Poetry.
Annie Stenzel's poetry has most recently appeared in Kestrel, Ambit, Catamaran Literary Reader, and Quiddity; in the online journals Lunch Ticket, West Trestle Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, and Unsplendid; and in the anthology Patient Poets. Her translations of the German poet, Hilde Domin, have been published in Parthenon West and Two Lines. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also a letterpress printer, and was a member of a noted collective called Thicket Press, which published a number of hand-chapbooks and broadsides.


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28 FEBRUARY 2016 — sunday

Merle Lyn Bachman and Sharon Coleman

Poetry Flash presents a book launch reading by poets Merle Lyn Bachman, Blood Party, and Sharon Coleman, Paris Blinks, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Merle Lyn Bachman's new book of poems is Blood Party. Elizabeth Robinson says, "Bachman's beautifully crafted, acutely sensitive poems adroitly combine history, autobiography, and lyric meditation….This is a poetry that sends messages into the hidden sites of memory and returns with color, form, and commitment." An earlier collection is Diorama with Fleeing Figures. She has also published several chapbooks, including Wrecker's Ball. The granddaughter of Yiddish-speaking immigrants who fled Poland, she is the author of Recovering "Yiddishland": Threshold Moments in American Literature, a combination of memoir, translation, and literary criticism that was also her Ph.D. dissertation in English.
Sharon Coleman's first full-length book of micro-fiction is Paris Blinks. Indigo Moor says, "Similar in concept to Calvino's seminal work, Invisible Cities, the sensual, the alluring, and the distasteful are woven into a collection of fifty, fifty-word jaunts that walk the razored tightrope of harsh realism with an exquisite, magical nuance." She is the author of the poetry chapbook Half Circle, writes for Poetry Flash as a contributing editor, co-curates the poetry reading series Lyrics & Dirges, and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival.


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10 MARCH 2016 — thursday

Ed Pavlić and C. Dale Young

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Ed Pavlić, Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno, and C. Dale Young, The Halo, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Ed Pavlić's new book of poems is Let's Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno. Adrienne Rich has called his work, "Dialogic, dangerous, this is a poetics of body and soul, music to listen to with all five senses." Among his previous collections are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, Labors Lost Left Unfinished, Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway, and Visiting Hours at the Color Line. He has also written several critical books, including Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture and Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners.
C. Dale Young's new book of poems is The Halo. David Orr says, "Young is a doctor as well as a poet, and [his poetry] demonstrates a skilled physician's combination of empathy and formal precision." His previous collections include The Day Underneath the Day, The Second Person, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and Torn, which National Public Radio called one of the best poetry collections of 2011. His work has appeared several times in The Best American Poetry, and he's been anthologized in Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation. Among his honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.


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17 MARCH 2016 — thursday

Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Dana Gioia

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Dana Gioia, 99 Poems: New and Selected, and Iris Jamahl Dunkle, There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Iris Jamahl Dunkle's new book of poems is There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air. Ada Limón says, "Part historical journey through Northern California's loaded past, part deep praise of the land…There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air is a book of solitude, longing, landscape, and myth-making." Her first book of poems, Gold Passage, won the Trio Award; she's also published two chapbooks, Inheritance and The Flying Trolley. On the staff of the Napa Valley Writers conference and co-facilitator of the book discussion group at Jack London State Historic Park, she is at work on a biography of Jack London's wife, Charmian London.
Dana Gioia is California's brand new Poet Laureate. His new book of poems is 99 Poems: New & Selected. The Hudson Review calls him "One of today's masters of the genre, headed, ever more clearly, for whatever kind of immortality, in these prosaic times, awaits the best poets.…" He's published four previous books of poems, including Interrogations at Noon, which won an American Book Award, and Pity the Beautiful. His first book of criticism Can Poetry Matter? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. From 2003 to 2009 he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also the editor of fifteen anthologies of poetry and fiction, a translator and a librettist. He worked for fifteen years as a business executive in New York before he quit in 1992 to write full-time.


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20 MARCH 2016 — sunday

Laurel Blossom and Brian Komei Dempster

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Laurel Blossom, Longevity, and Brian Komei Dempster, Topaz, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Laurel Blossom's new book of poems is Longevity. Gary Young says, "The fallen Twin Towers are ghostly sentinels that loom over Laurel Blossom's haunting meditation on history, identity and grief. Longevity oscillates between collective loss and personal anguish, and in Blossom's telling, one body becomes every body, and individual loss encompasses everyone." Among her previous books are the book-length narrative prose poem Degrees of Latitude and Wednesday: New and Selected Poems. Currently the first ever Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina, she is also co-founder of The Writers Community, the residency and advanced workshop program of the YMCA National Writer's Voice. She is editor of Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from the Writers Community and Splash! Great Writing About Swimming, among other volumes.
Brian Komei Dempster's debut book of poems is Topaz. Richard Tillinghast says, "Topaz is a significant and moving addition to one of the oldest and most firmly rooted of literary genres—the quest. In this highly personal and deeply felt new book, Brian Komei Dempster attempts to probe and understand through poetry his family's experiences in one of our country's most shameful episodes, the internment of American citizens of Japanese origin during the Second World War." He is editor of both From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America's Concentration Camps, which received a 2007 Nisei Voices Award from the National Japanese American Historical Society, and Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement. Widely published in literary journals, his work has also been anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation.


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24 MARCH 2016 — thursday

Terry Lucas and Campbell McGrath

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Terry Lucas, In This Room, and Campbell McGrath, XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Terry Lucas's first full-length collection is In This Room. Alicia Suskin Ostriker said of his work, ""I imagine the ghosts of Hart Crane and Larry Levis welcoming Terry Lucas into their fraternity. With admiration and delight, I welcome this American life, this American voice." He won the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Featured Poet Award and the 2012 Littoral Press Poetry Prize; his poems have garnered five Pushcart Prize nominations. His work has been published in journals including Best New Poets 2012, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, Grain Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Naugatuck River Review, MiPoesias, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His chapbook, If They Have Ears To Hear, won the Copperdome Chapbook Contest.
Campbell McGrath's new book of poems is XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century. David Biespiel wrote, "McGrath has already developed a signature style that is brutally expansive, slangy, and rife with high- and low-toned jargon. His 'promethean eruptions' are at once explosive, swaggering, opportunistic and flip.…A brilliant bubbling forth of a comic and serious intelligence." The book is comprised of a hundred poems, one for each year, studded with cultural icons, writers, artists, leaders, chronicling and probing the turbulence and profundities of the century that was. He is the author of nine previous collections; his writing has been published in the New York Times, Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, and many other journals, and among his honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation 'genius grant'.


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7 APRIL 2016 — thursday

Sharon Dolin and Madelon Sprengnether

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Sharon Dolin, Life, and Madelon Sprengnether, Near Solstice: Prose Poems, and Great River Road: Memoir and Memory, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Sharon Dolin's new book of poems is Manual for Living. Matthea Harvey says, "Manual for Living contains poems that bloom via rhyme and wordplay into complex and disarming self-knowledge and self-instruction. There is comfort and delight in the movement and mind of these poems." She is the author of five previous collections, including Burn and Dodge, winner of the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She teaches poetry workshops at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y and Poets House and directs the Center for Book Arts Annual Letter-press Poetry Chapbook Competition in New York City.
Madelon Sprengnether's new book of poems is Near Solstice: Prose Poems. Edward Hirsch says, "Madelon Sprengnether's short prose poems surprise us with their quick turns and telegraphic insights, their physical bearing—what she calls 'bodyworlds'—and spiritual poise. Near Solstice is a book of urgencies." She's also a memoirist, a critic, and a feminist psychoanalytic critic and theorist. Among her publications are The Angel of Duluth and The Normal Heart, poetry; Great River Road, Crying at the Movies, and Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams, memoir; and The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Criticism, Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender, and The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, feminist psychoanalytic criticism. She will be celebrating both her new book of poems and her new memoir, Great River Road: Memoir and Memory at this event.


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14 APRIL 2016 — thursday

Salgado Maranhão, translator Alexis Levitin, Kathleen Weaver

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Brazilian poet Salgado Maranhão, Tiger Fur, with his translator Alexis Levitin, and Berkeley poet and translator Kathleen Weaver, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Salgado Maranhão is Brazil's best-known poet of his generation; he's won every major literary award his country has to offer and has collaborated extensively with well-known Brazilian musicians, appearing on numerous recordings. He is touring with his two books in English translation, Blood of the Sun (2012), and his new one, Tiger Fur, about which Sheryl St. Germain says, "The wildly imaginative poems of Tiger Fur read like burning transcripts of one possessed with the rare gift of pure poetry. The collection is a hymn to desire, and to the ecstasy and pain of love.…"
Tiger Fur's translator, Alexis Levitin, translator of thirty-one books of poetry, whose honors include three Fulbrights and two National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowships, will present the English translations.
Kathleen Weaver is a poet and an acclaimed translator from the Spanish. Her translations include Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing: Selected Poetry, by Nancy Morejón; Nicaraguan Sketches, by Julio Cortázar; and Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, by Omar Cabezas. She is the author of the biographical study Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, including translations of Magda Portal's poetry. Kathleen Weaver's debut book of poems, Too Much Happens, was published last year.


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17 APRIL 2016 — sunday

Drew Dillhunt and Angela Hume

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Drew Dillhunt and Angela Hume, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, 3:00 (510/649-1320, www.pegasusbookstore.com)

Drew Dillhunt's debut book of poems is Leaf is All, which won the 2015 Bear Star Press Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Craig Santos Perez says, "Through avant-garde, documentary, and eco-poetic modes, Drew Dilhunt weaves the intimate themes of birth, parenthood, and family into the global contexts of plastic production and ecological collapse…Read these poems carefully because they are tenderly inscribed with fragmented origins and precarious futures." Widely published in literary journals, his writing has appeared in VOLT, Mudlark, Tarpaulin Sky, and Jacket2. An earlier version of Leaf is All was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. He's released two albums of songs, one with the band Fighting Shy, and is currently a member of the Seattle-based band Answering Machines. He is Associate Editor of Hummingbird Press.
Angela Hume's debut book of poems is Middle Time. Joan Retallack asks, "What happens when in a time of extreme crisis the action (poiesis) of a discerning mind creates not arguments or proposals, but poetry? …Hume's active generosity of material and imaginative space makes it possible to conjure myriad forms of life thriving in improbably unconsummated ruin." She is the author of three poetry chapbooks; she's also a critic whose essays have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Contemporary Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Jacket2. She co-coordinated the first ever Conference on Ecopoetics in Berkeley in 2013 and co-curates Heart's Desire, the reading series of the Bay Area Public School.


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1 MAY 2016 — sunday

Willis Barnstone and Tony Barnstone

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Willis Barnstone, Mexico in My Heart, and Tony Barnstone, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Willis Barnstone's new book of poems is Mexico in My Heart: New and Selected Poems. He is a translator, memoirist, editor, and Biblical and Gnostic scholar as well as a poet; a man who's authored and edited some seventy books. Recent books of poems include Moon Book and Sun Book and Stickball on 88th Street; among his scriptural works and translations are The Other Bible and The New Covenant Commonly Called the New Testament. He has been four times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and in 2015 he was awarded the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Northern California Book Reviewers at the Northern California Book Awards.
Willis's son, Tony Barnstone's new book of poems is Pulp Sonnets. Dorianne Laux says, "Tony Barnstone takes a walk on the wild side, the darkest dark of the wild side, and stabs us with his manic sonnets of gore, tossing up the meat we call human before taking it down with his forked tongue." His recent collections include Tongue of War, winner of the John Ciardi Prize, and The Golem of Los Angeles, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award for Poetry. Translator, editor, and fiction writer, too, he's published seventeen books and a music CD. His honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and the Pablo Neruda Prize.


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26 MAY 2016 — thursday

Carol Snow and Brian Teare

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poets Carol Snow and Brian Teare from their new books, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Carol Snow's new book is Position Paper: New and Selected Poems. Robert Hass has called her work "brilliant, funny, subtle," Cole Swenson "delicate and masterful," and Fanny Howe has deemed it "a new and mesmerizing way of looking at things." Her previous books are Artist and Model, selected by Robert Hass for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Poetry Center Book Award; For; The Seventy Prepositions; and Placed: Karesansui Poems. Among her honors are the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Poetry Fund grant.
Brian Teare's new book of poems is The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. Cole Swensen says, "A kind of stillness gradually builds through these carefully-shaped pieces, a distilled poise in which one comes to hear Agnes Martin as one simultaneously sees the Zen koan that the collection itself slowly, precisely forms." He's published four previous books of poems, The Room Where I Was Born, winner of the Brittingham Prize; Sight Map; Pleasure, which won the Lambda Award; and Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts, he's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry, among others. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.


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9 JUNE 2016 — thursday

Claire Crowther and Susan Kelly-DeWitt

Poetry Flash presents a reading by British poet Claire Crowther and Sacramento poet Susan Kelly-DeWitt from their new books, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Claire Crowther’s new book of poems is On Narrowness. Poetry Review says, “Claire Crowther is a poet whose confident, highly sensuous explorations of language and gender deserve to be read and recognized.” She is a UK poet returning to Berkeley on her second visit. Her previous two collections are Stretch of Closures, shortlisted for the Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prize, and The Clockwork Gift. She is also the author of three poetry chapbooks, and a fourth, Bare George, written as part of her residency at the Royal Mint Museum, is forthcoming.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt’s new book of poems is Spider Season. Frank Gaspar says, “Susan Kelly-DeWitt finds poems everywhere, or perhaps they find her, falling around her like snowflakes or cascading leaves…She sees the world her way and writes her mind. And this is exactly what good poets do.” She’s published numerous previous collections, most recently The Fortunate Islands and Cassiopeia Above the Banyan Tree. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has been widely published, and anthologized in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a contributing editor of Poetry Flash, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Northern California Book Reviewers.


12 JUNE 2016 — sunday

Susan Cohen and Catherine Abbey Hodges

Poetry Flash presents a poetry book launch reading by Susan Cohen, A Different Wakeful Animal, with Catherine Abbey Hodges, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Join us for the official book launch of Susan Cohen’s second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, winner of the 2015 Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. Stephen Dunn says, “Her descriptions constitute what I want to call intelligence—someone in the act of getting the world right, making it ours as well as hers.” A former contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she was also a professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and anthologized in the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry.
Catherine Abbey Hodges’s debut book of poems is Instead of Sadness, winner of the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Paulann Petersen says, “Catherine Abbey Hodges offers us—inside each musical line, within each vibrant trope—a luminous wisdom. Each poem gives us a world ‘replenished like a well // in blues and greens and wings.’” She is also author of the chapbook All the While, and she is professor of English at Porterville College in central California.


16 JUNE 2016 — thursday

Gillian Conoley and Matthew Cooperman

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Gillian Conoley and Matthew Cooperman, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Matthew Cooperman's new book of poems is Spool, Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize. Rae Armantrout says, "Spool is a hive of words continuously active and also continuously threatened with a sort of colony collapse. Written in conversation with such past greats as Shakespeare, Milton, Hopkins, Spool is a way of inhabiting our present." His previous collections include the text + image collaboration Imago for the Fallen World with Marius Lehene, Still: of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move, DaZE, and A Sacrificial Zinc, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize. He's a founding editor of Quarter After Eight and co-poetry editor of Colorado Review.
Gillian Conoley's latest book of poems is Peace. Yusef Komunyakaa says "Gillian Conoley's Peace encompasses the wholeness of a world vision." Peace was named an American Academy of Poets Standout Book for 2014. She is the author of seven other collections, including Tall Stranger, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent publication is Thousand Times Broken: Three Books, her translation of three previously untranslated books of Henri Michaux. Cole Swensen says, "This is an invaluable addition to Michaux's works in English, filling an important gap with a vivid, vibrant linguistic performance." Editor/founder of VOLT, she's been anthologized in American Hybrid and Postmodern American Poetry, and her honors include a Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review, a Fund for Poetry Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.


7 JULY 2016 — thursday

Michelle Bitting, Dorianne Laux, and Joseph Millar

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, and Michelle Bitting, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Michelle Bitting's new book of poems is The Couple Who Fell to Earth. Juan Felipe Herrera says, "In a multi-directional 'one shape' of voices, time, people, spaces Bitting takes us in and out of her all seeing third eye poetics. We go into an orb of family, love, then we swoop out into the delight of humanity.…A unique treasure of visions and voice." Her first collection, Good Friday Kiss, was chosen by Thomas Lux for the DeNovo First Book Award, and her second, Notes To The Beloved, won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award and got a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.
Dorianne Laux's fifth book of poems is The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Prize. Alan Shapiro says, "The Book of Men…could just as easily have been called The Book of Empathy, or The Book of Negative Capability, or The Book of Intimate Awareness of Who We Are and How We Got To Be This Way. Whether she is writing about men or women, the powerful or the powerless, the present day or the past, Laux observes, evokes and meditates with profound compassion and understanding for the delicate complexities of the human heart." Her previous collections are Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Smoke, and Facts About the Moon, which won the Oregon Book Award. Among her other honors are a Pushcart Prize, two appearances in Best American Poetry, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Joseph Millar's new book of poems is Blue Rust. Tony Hoagland observes of it, "…long spiraling sentences full of used cars and kung pao chicken, umbilical blood and rent money, lentils and sausage and death.…Blue Rust is a big, beautiful book of poems—moving, sensuous, artful, full of courage and blessings." His previous collections are Overtime and Fortune. His honors include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.


10 JULY 2016 — sunday

Brynn Saito and Jacqueline Derner Tchakalian

Poetry Flash presents a Red Hen Press reading by poets Brynn Saito and Jacqueline Derner Tchakalian, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Brynn Saito's new book of poems is Power Made Us Swoon. Kazim Ali says, "The questions this book asks of its mythological and actual heroes are questions I want to know the answers to. Her own are brave…but they are also beautiful. As the poet reassures herself, 'Your spirit is a songstress/ occupying the sea.'" Her first collection is The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award; she also co-authored the chapbook Bright Power, Dark Peace with Traci Brimhall. Anthologized by both Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed, she's received a Kundiman Asian American Poetry Fellowship and the Poets 11 Award from the San Francisco Public Library.
Jacqueline Derner Tchakalian's debut book of poems is The Size of Our Bed. Charles Harper Webb says it "is powered by the pain of loss, but leavened by careful craft and a heart that, in being true to itself, cannot be permanently cast down. I celebrate how these poems rise from the ashes of grief, triumphant and full of life." Trained as a visual artist, she's come to poetry late in her life. That discovery caused a ten-year hiatus in her painting, but it also resulted in this powerful book.


14 JULY 2016 — thursday

Cynthia Kraman, Sharon Coleman, Joyce Jenkins

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by New York poet Cynthia Kraman, with Sharon Coleman and Joyce Jenkins, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Cynthia Kraman's latest book of poems is The Touch. Bob Holman says, "The Touch, the long-awaited new book of poetry from medievalist and former punk-rocker Cynthia Kraman, tosses New Formalism on its ear, and its rock lyrics…resuscitate Wordsworth…a superb, extraordinary, shocking, unflinching, charming, hilarious, perfectly gem-cut book." Her first book, Taking on the Local Color, was the Wesleyan New Poets Selection for 1976. Other collections include Club 82 and The Mexican Murals. Published in such journals as The Paris Review and Open City, her poetry has been anthologized in Ordinary Women, New York: Poems, and Bowery Women: Poems. She is professor of English literature at the College of New Rochelle in New York.
Sharon Coleman's first full-length book of micro-fiction is Paris Blinks. Indigo Moor says, "Similar in concept to Calvino's seminal work, Invisible Cities, the sensual, the alluring, and the distasteful are woven into a collection of fifty, fifty-word jaunts that walk the razored tightrope of harsh realism with an exquisite, magical nuance." She is the author of the chapbook Half Circle, writes for Poetry Flash as a contributing editor, co-curates the poetry reading series Lyrics & Dirges, and co-directs the Berkeley Poetry Festival.
Joyce Jenkins is editor of Poetry Flash online review and literary calendar. She has two chapbooks, Portal and Joy Road. Her poetry has appeared in Burning the Midnight Oil, Ambush Review, ZYZZYVA, The Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley's Poetry Walk, and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed. She received the American Book Award in 1994, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2006, and, for Poetry Flash, the Litquake Barbary Coast Award 2012. Co-curator of the Poetry Flash Reading Series, she is sharing a few poems to open the reading in homage to Cynthia and Sharon.


21 JULY 2016 — thursday

Laurel Ann Bogen and Mk Chavez

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by LA poet Laurel Ann Bogen with Oakland poet Mk Chavez, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Laurel Ann Bogen's new book of poems is Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Steve Kowit said, "Laurel Ann Bogen's poems are lethal and smoking…an exuberant mix of human passions, a collection of poems that are at once mad with voltage and utterly sane." Her many collections include Washing a Language and The Last Girl in the Land of Butterflies. Ranging in themes as diverse as horrific beauty and exquisite madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, life in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and growing up as a Baby Boomer, these poems offer sly, humorous, surreal, and genre-busting work that can only be called Vintage Bogen. She was also a founding member of the celebrated performance group Nearly Fatal Women.
Mk Chavez's new book of poems is Mothermorphosis. Blas Falconer says, "The extraordinary poems in Mothermorphosis place readers in the particular life of a daughter and her schizophrenic mother; however, a larger world, full of war and tenderness, misunderstanding and clarity, vulnerability and empowerment…is present, too, so the book speaks with great urgency for all and to all of us." She is author of Virgin Eyes and several other chapbooks; a new full-length collection, Dear Animal, is forthcoming this fall. Co-founder and co-curator of Lyrics & Dirges, the Berkeley-based monthly reading series, she is also co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival and a proud member of the Association of Black & Black Writers.


7 AUGUST 2016 — sunday

Judy Halebsky and Nina Lindsay

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Judy Halebsky and Nina Lindsay, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Judy Halebsky's most recent book is Tree Line. Dean Rader says, "Robert Frost believed a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom, but in Tree Line, Judy Halebsky proves a poet never has to choose between the two—her poems begin in both and end in both. Smart, sexy, thoughtful, and beautiful, Halebsky's lyrics are a masterful marriage of tradition and innovation." Her first book, Sky=Empty, won the New Issues Prize and was a finalist for the California Book Award. Her chapbook, Space/Gap/Interval/Distance won the Poets-Under-Forty Award from Sixteen Rivers Press.
Nina Lindsay's new book of poems is Because. W. S. Di Piero says, "…Because is beautiful work. The poems pick through the things of the world, her world, exposing the unseen and intensifying the seen.…The familiar becomes, in her telling, unfamiliar and fraught.…The poems, too, even in their melancholies, are rapturous." Her first collection, Today's Special Dish, was published in 2007. She is a member of the Northern California Book Reviewers; among her honors is the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize.


11 SEPTEMBER 2016 — sunday

Susanne Dyckman and Elizabeth Robinson

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Susanne Dyckman, A Dark Ordinary, and Elizabeth Robinson, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Susanne Dyckman's new book of poems is A Dark Ordinary. George Albon says, "A Dark Ordinary is concerned with a double struggle, that of imagining the words of the early twentieth century immigrants denied civil voices, through the always mute barriers of the photographic record…Dyckman's poems are courageous attempts to puncture this hard double membrane." She is also the author of the collection equilibrium's form and three chapbooks. She is co-editor, as well, of Instance Press.
Elizabeth Robinson's most recent book of poems is On Ghosts. Andrew Joron says, "On Ghosts returns us to the haunted aura around words. Here, a crossing of genres—poetry, prose meditation, personal testimony—shows that language itself amounts to a gathering of ghosts. Robinson's oblique lyricism beckons us toward a twilight zone where we become 'witness to the unverifiable.' This is writing as the highest form of bewitching." Her previous books include Counterpart, Blue Heron, Three Novels: Poems, House Made of Silver, Also Know As, Inaudible Trumpeters, Under That Silky Roof, and Apprehend, winner of the 2003 Fence Modern Poets Prize. She has received grants from the Fund for Poetry, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Boomerang Foundation, and recently served as the Hugo Fellow at the University of Montana.


22 SEPTEMBER 2016 — thursday

Pattie McCarthy, Denise Newman, Laura Walker

Poetry Flash presents an Apogee Press poetry reading by Pattie McCarthy, Denise Newman, and Laura Walker, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Pattie McCarthy's new Apogee book of poems is Quiet Book. Julie Carr says, "…Quiet Book keeps its steady gaze on the mother/child unit—from the inside out and back in again. In gorgeous poems of formal range and daring, McCarthy gives us birth and motherhood like no other writer—she is unafraid, she is wry and at times she is deeply tender." Among her previous collections are Marybones, Table Alphabetical of Hard Words, Verso, and bk of (h)rs. She was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 2011, and was an artist resident at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia in 2013.
Denise Newman's new Apogee book is Future People. She is a poet and a translator. Her books of poetry include The New Make Believe, Wild Goods, and Human Forest. She's translated Azorno and The Painted Room, both by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen, and Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt, which won the PEN Translation Award. In 2014 she received a Creative Work Fund grant and an NEA fellowship in translation.
Laura Walker's new Apogee book of poems is story. Maxine Chernoff says, "Walker's rich and delicate story of natural forces, human forces, master narratives, and secret moments whispered on deathbeds is as whole and fragile as any fine sequence of poems….It is the story of herself and the story of the story. It is a dance of life and death and a music to live by." Her previous collections are Follow-Haswed, bird book, rimertown/an atlas, and swarm lure.


6 OCTOBER 2016 — thursday

"América invertida" editor Jesse Lee Kercheval with translators, contributors

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading and celebration for the new anthology América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets, with editor Jesse Lee Kercheval, and translators Catherine Jagoe, Ron Salutsky, Julia Leverone, Keith Ekiss, and Uruguayan poet Laura Cesarco Eglin, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets, edited by Jesse Lee Kercheval, introduces twenty-two Uruguayan poets under the age of forty to an English-speaking audience in a bilingual edition. At this fast-paced event, the editor will be joined by translators Catherine Jagoe, Ron Salutsky, Julia Leverone, Keith Ekiss, and Uruguayan poet Laura Cesarco Eglin to read poems from the collection. Translator Peter Thompson says, "This superbly edited anthology breaks new ground. North Americans and Anglophones with diverse interests will come to this trove of new writing with gratitude. Not only have we lacked access to this era of Uruguayan poetry, but the poems themselves are brilliant—and the translations crisp and sure-footed."

  • Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author, editor, and translator of thirteen books, four of them works of fiction, memoir, and poetry, including Cinema Muto, My Life as a Silent Movie: A Novel. Her translations include The Invisible Bridge/El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia
  • Laura Cesarco Eglin is an Uruguayan poet. Her books include Llamar al agua por su nombre, Sastrería, and Los brazos del saguaro.
  • Keith Ekiss is the author of the poetry collection Pima Road Notebook and the translator of The Fire's Journey by the Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio.
  • Catherine Jagoe is the author of the poetry collection Bloodroot. Her translations include the Amnesty International award-winning Argentine novel My Name is Light by Elsa Osorio.
  • Julia Leverone is the editor of Sakura Review. Her translations of Paco Urondo's poetry have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Witness, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry International, and Tupelo Quarterly.
  • Ron Paul Salutsky is the author of the poetry collection Romeo Bones. His translations include Karen Wild's Anti-Ferule.


9 OCTOBER 2016 — sunday

Martha Collins and Rosa Lane

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Martha Collins, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, and Rosa Lane, Tiller North, request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

Martha Collins’s new book of poems is Admit One: An American Scrapbook. Booklist calls it “An unflinching look at the underpinnings of racism in the U.S.…Her poems are lists, definitions, newspaper pages, historic time lines, and biographical facts. These diverse poetic forms highlight the beauty of diversity itself. But Collins never lets up on the driving themes of unethical treatment and collective culpability.” Among her previous collections are Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front. The last two both won Ohioana awards, and Blue Front also won an Ansfield-Wolf Book Award and was chosen one of “25 Books to Remember” by the New York Public Library. Among her other publications are three books of co-translation from the Vietnamese.
Rosa Lane’s first full-length book of poems is Tiller North, from Sixteen Rivers Press. Jeffrey Levine says, “Rosa Lane’s poetry reminds us why, at a certain time in our lives, we’ve had enough of innocence. Here is a compendium of those so crucial, chronology-defying self-revelations that we only know through our skin. Every line carries with it a resonant sense of what matters and why.” Widely published in literary journals, such as Ploughshares and Crab Orchard Review, she is the author of the chapbook Roots and Reckonings. She works as an architect, with a Ph.D. in sustainable architecture, and she divides her time between Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area.


13 OCTOBER 2016 — thursday

Therése Halscheid and Lenore Weiss

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Lenore Weiss, Mortal, and Therése Halscheid, Frozen Latitudes, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Therése Halscheid's new book of poems is Frozen Latitudes. Paul Lisicky says, "The wrenching attempt to comprehend a father's dementia fires Therése Halscheid's Frozen Latitudes. Past starvation, past an encounter with a demanding landscape, the poet emerges tougher, wiser, her compassion intact." Her previous collections include Powertalk, Without Home, and Uncommon Geography, which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. A photographer as well as a poet, she's traveled widely through cultural exchange programs, teaching in England and Russia, and through the Alaskan Arts Council with an Inupiaq Eskimo tribe on White Mountain; her photography has chronicled her journeys and been in juried shows. She's received fellowships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New Jersey Council for the Arts.
Lenore Weiss's new book of poems is Mortal. Sharon Doubiago says, "Lenore Weiss's psychic linguistic engagement borders on the surreal, on the transcendent, the mystical, the magical, and on the mundane and familiar." She's published two earlier books of poems, Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island and Two Places. She's blogged for the Jewish Book Council and Basmati, and she works as copy editor for the Blue Lyra Review.


20 OCTOBER 2016 — thursday

Randall Mann and Adrienne Su

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Adrienne Su, Living Quarters, and Randall Mann, Straight Razor, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Randall Mann’s most recent book of poems is Straight Razor. Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times calls it “Bawdy yet elegant poems depicting the debaucheries and traumas of growing up amid San Francisco’s gay scene…Craft and bravura mix well…Mann shows himself [Thom Gunn’s] apt pupil.” His two previous collections are Breakfast with Thom Gunn and Complaint in the Garden. His new collection, Proprietary, will be published in summer 2017.
Adrienne Su’s most recent book of poems is Living Quarters. Cate Marvin says, “Su’s approach is risky in its sheer honesty and fierce by way of simplicity.” Her previous collections are The Middle Kingdom, Sanctuary, and Having None of It. Her work has been anthologized in The New American Poets, The Pushcart Prize XXIV, and Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, and her honors, along with her Pushcart Prize, include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center and The Frost Place. She teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.


3 NOVEMBER 2016 — thursday

Kim Addonizio and Brendan Constantine

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Kim Addonizio, Mortal Trash, and Brendan Constantine, Dementia, My Darling, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Kim Addonizio's new book of poems is Mortal Trash. San Francisco Book Review says, "Kim Addonizio's voice lifts from the page, alive and biting…unleashing wit with a ruthless observation." Poet, fiction writer, and memoirist, she has a teeming resume: author of six previous poetry collections, including Tell Me, which was a National Book Award finalist, two novels, two books of short stories, a memoir, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet's Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. Her honors include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, one from the Guggenheim Foundation, and two Pushcart Prizes.
Brendan Constantine's new book of poems is Dementia, My Darling. Amy Gerstler says it is "a suite of acute, beautiful poems about coming apart, slippage, love, emptying out, transformation, and carrying on. Every absurdly human moment in them is handled with smarts and just the right mix of inventiveness and delicacy.…Tender and humane and unsparing, the poems never surrender to despair." His previous collections are Letters to Guns, Birthday Girl with Possum, and Calamity Joe. He has received grants and commissions from the Getty Museum, the James Irvine Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He's a terrific performer; he has appeared on National Public Radio, many podcasts, and YouTube, as well as live across the U.S. and Europe.


10 NOVEMBER 2016 — thursday

Gerald Fleming and Miriam Bird Greenberg

Poetry Flash presents a double book launch and poetry reading by Gerald Fleming and Miriam Bird Greenberg, the new Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize-winner, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Gerald Fleming's new book of poems is One. Frederick Barthelme has called it "dizzying and wonderful, pretzelesque." It's the result of two years' work using a language the poet describes as "constrained, but somehow liberated in that constraint." Among his previous collections are The Choreographer, Night of Pure Breathing, and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore. A public school teacher for thirty-seven years, he's written three prose books for teachers. And from 1995 to 2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review.
Miriam Bird Greenberg's new book of poems, In the Volcano's Mouth is the winner of the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for a first full-length book of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Ed Ochester, final judge, says, "These poems do what the best poetry sometimes does: reveal and deepen our understanding of the strangeness in the ordinary. And they do so in language clear as a bell." The daughter of a New York Jew and a goat-raising anthropologist in the back-to-land movement, she grew up on an organic farm in rural Texas. Author of two previous chapbooks, All night in the new country and Pact-Blood Fever Grass, she is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and The Poetry Foundation.


13 NOVEMBER 2016 — sunday

Karen Brennan and Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Poetry Flash presents a Four Way Books poetry reading by Karen Brennan and Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., request ASL interpreters one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Diesel, A Bookstore, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 3:00 (510/653-9965, dieselbookstore.com)

A Celebration and Reading for Four Way Books!
Karen Brennan’s new book is Monsters, stories, a collection of thirty-eight innovative fictions. Lance Olsen says, “Monsters takes the form of an extraordinary wunderkammer filled with narraticules…about what can’t stay, what was probably never there to begin with, and the beauty of that, and the biting loss.” Her previous book, little dark, is a hybrid of poems and prose threaded together as memoir. Her other previous books include two books of poems, Here on Earth and The Real Enough World, two books of short fiction, and a memoir. Her fiction and poetry are widely anthologized, and she’s the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Utah and teaches at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.’s new book of poems is Series | India. Jennifer Grotz calls it “a gorgeously-woven book-length sequence of poems that moves from New York to India, from a dying mother to a motley group of spiritual seekers.” Elizabeth T. Gray is a poet, translator, and corporate consultant. She has published translations from classical and contemporary Persian, and is currently collaborating on the translation of a Tibeto-Mongolian folk epic.


17 NOVEMBER 2016 — thursday

Dan Bellm, Stephen Kessler, Carolyn L. Tipton

Poetry Flash presents poetry in translation by three Bay Area translators reading from their new books: Dan Bellm reads from his translations of French poet Pierre Reverdy, Stephen Kessler reads his translations of Argentinian poet Julio Cortázar, and Carolyn L. Tipton reads her translations of Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

This will be a reading of poetry in translation.
Poet and translator Dan Bellm’s new book of translation is The Song of the Dead/Le chant des morts, by Pierre Reverdy, the famous French poet and Resistance fighter. His previous book of translation is Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue, by the Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca, nominated for the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Translation. His most recent book of poems, Practice, won a 2009 California Book Award. Among his other honors are Literary Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize.
Stephen Kessler is a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor. His new book of translation is Save Twilight, a selected poems of Julio Cortázar, the renowned Argentinian master of modern fiction who was also a prolific poet. Among Kessler’s other translations are works of Borges and the Spanish poet Luis Cernuda. His most recent book of prose poetry/memoir is Where Was I?, and his latest book of essays is Need I Say More?. He is a longtime contributing editor for Poetry Flash.
Carolyn L. Tipton is a poet and translator. Her new book of translation is Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance, by Rafael Alberti, the great Spanish poet who was part of the “Generation of 1927.” Returnings is the winner of the 2016 Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Her first Alberti translation, To Painting: Poems by Rafael Alberti, won the National Translation Award. Among her other honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.


1 DECEMBER 2016 — thursday

Mariela Griffor and Lynne Knight

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and publisher Mariela Griffor, translator of Pablo Neruda, and poet and translator Lynne Knight, who will be launching her new book of poems, The Persistence of Longing, request ASL interpreters one week in advance at editor@poetryflash.org, wheelchair accessible, Moe's Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, 7:30 (510/849-2087, www.moesbooks.com)

Mariela Griffor's new book is a translation of Pablo Neruda's Canto General: Song of the Americas, edited by Jeffrey Levine, perhaps Neruda's most daring and ambitious project, depicting history as a vast, continuous struggle against oppression. Griffor was born in Concepción in southern Chile. She left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden and now lives in the U.S., in Michigan and Washington D.C., where she is Honorary Consul of Chile. She is the founder of Marick Press and is the author of three books of poems, Exiliana, House, and The Psychiatrist.
Lynne Knight's new book of poems is The Persistence of Longing. Cecilia Woloch says, "I've never read poems that seem to me more accurate about love and desire and sexual relationships and their almost-inevitable shattering—darkly gorgeous and expertly-crafted poems, with a white-hot lyric intensity and a narrative pull that becomes cumulative, an erotic veering toward doom." She is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, and translator of I Know (Je sais), by Ito Naga, from the French. Among her honors are publication in Best American Poetry, the Prix de l'Alliance Française 2006, the 2009 Rattle Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.


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