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2021 Poetry Flash Reading Series


Poetry Flash readings readings that are live and in person take place at Moe's Books, Berkeley, and at East Bay Booksellers, Oakland. Due to shelter-in-place and the pandemic, the Poetry Flash Reading Series has become a virtual series as of August 9, 2020, presented online until further notice. To find out more about the Poetry Flash Reading Series, please email editor@poetryflash.org. ASL interpreters for the deaf and hearing impaired may be requested with at least one week's notice, email editor@poetryflash.org. Our bookstore venues are wheelchair accessible. Read more about the series on the Poetry Flash Reading Series page.


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21 FEBRUARY 2021 — sunday

Connie Post, Margo Taft Stever, Stephanie Strickland

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Connie Post, Prime Meridian, Margo Taft Stever, Cracked Piano, and Stephanie Strickland, How the Universe is Made: Poems New & Selected, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, February 21 at 3:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you poetry via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley, and the books will be available at https://bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings. (There may be additional book inks in the event chatbox.)

Connie Post's new book of poems is Prime Meridian. Dean Rader said, "I have been on fire / since the moment I walked / through this door." Thus begins one of the many burning poems in Connie Post's Prime Meridian. In fact, the work in this book is so good it is as though Post herself has been on fire since she walked through the door of poetry. In poems both personal and political, Post manages to connect physical and geological ailments by way of her spare but unsparing lyrics. This is an important collection everyone should be reading." Her first full-length book, Floodwater, won the Lyrebird Award; her chapbook, And When the Sun Drops, received the Aurorean's Editor's Chapbook Award. She's published seven collections. Her Awards include the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award, Liakoura Award, Caesura Poetry Award, and First Prize in the Prick of the Spindle Poetry Competition. Host of several reading series, most recently the Second Sunday Poetry Reading Series at the Valona Deli, she also served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, 2005-2009.

Margo Taft Stever's two new books of poems are Cracked Piano and Ghost Moose. Fred Marchant wrote, "The taut, unflinching lyricism of this work reminds us of the courage it takes to see our lives as they are. These are poems that affirm the saving grace that we remain ready and eager to sing in our sorrow, even if the accompaniment is only a cracked piano." Her other books include The Lunatic Ball, The Hudson Line, Frozen Spring (Mid-List Press First Series Award), and Reading the Night Sky (Riverstone Press Poetry Chapbook Competition). She co-authored Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to China. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Verse Daily, Prairie Schooner; "poem-a-day" on poets.org, Academy of American Poets; Cincinnati Review; Plume, and Salamander. She's the founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center as well as the founder and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press and lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Stephanie Strickland's newest books of poems are How the Universe is Made: Poems New & Selected 1985-2019 and Ringing the Changes. Marjorie Perloff says of her, "One of contemporary poetry's polymaths, her poetry displays an astonishing command of scientific knowledge and unusual verbal virtuosity." Author of nine books of poems, her honors include a Pushcart, Brittingham, Sandeen, Boston Review, and Best of the Net Prizes. She has been granted National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Foundation for the Arts, and New York Creative Artists Public Service fellowships. A member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Literature Organization, she co-edited Electronic Literature Collection/I. Her digital poems have been shown widely in Europe, Canadian, and the U.S. including at the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. She lives in New York City.


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28 FEBRUARY 2021 — sunday

Nathalie Anderson and Terry Tierney

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Nathalie Anderson, Stain, and Terry Tierney, The Poet's Garage, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, February 28 at 3:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you poetry via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books will be available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings

Nathalie Anderson's latest book of poems is Stain; she's author as well of the chapbook Held and Firmly Bound. Eamon Grennan said, "Stain is Anderson's richest collection so far. Fresh and irrepressibly inventive (in language, in image, in the way thought and feeling are yoked together), it moves from secular hymns of praise for the illuminations of stained glass, to elegy-edged family memories, to scalpel-sharp probings of the deeper, darker recesses of the self." She's published three previous collections, Following Fred Astaire, which won the 1998 Washington Prize from Wordworks, Crawlers, which won the 2005 McGovern Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and Quiver. Her poems have been anthologized and widely published in literary journals, including The New Yorker, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, and Plume. In addition to her poetry, she's an accomplished librettist, with libretti to four operas to her credit. A fellow at Yaddo in 1986, she was also awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in 1993.

Terry Tierney's new book of poems, The Poet's Garage, was published in 2020. Joan Gelfand wrote, "The Poet's Garage, Terry Tierney's debut collection is, like most garages, a wild mashup. Loss, patch-ups and re-building are the themes that stitch this collection together. In compact lines and gorgeous prose poems, Tierney speaks to what it is to be an observer, a recorder and a player all at once." He's also a fiction writer whose irreverent Vietnam era road novel, Lucky Ride, is forthcoming in 2022. His stories and poems have been widely published in over forty literary journals, including Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Quarterly, and elsewhere. A teacher of college composition and creative writing, originally from the Midwest, he's re-established his roots in the San Francisco Bay Area where he survived several Silicon Valley startups as a software engineer.


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14 MARCH 2021 — sunday

Brian Komei Dempster and Lee Herrick

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Brian Komei Dempster, Seize, and Lee Herrick, Scar and Flower, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, March 14 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Brian Komei Dempster and Lee Herrick via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

Brian Komei Dempster's new book of poems is Seize. Patrick Phillips says, "Brian Komei Dempster's central subject—his son's epilepsy—could not be more freighted with risk, and yet Seize achieves a pitch-perfect harmony of lament and praise, suffering and solace.…This is a stunning, heartbreaker of a book." His first collection, Topaz, won the 15 Bytes 2014 Book Award in Poetry. Widely published in literary journals, his poems have also been anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and elsewhere. He is editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing up in 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. As poet, workshop director, and editor, he's received grants from Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the Arts Foundation of Michigan, California State Library's California Civil Liberties Publication Education Program, Center for Cultural Innovation, and San Francisco Arts Commission.

Lee Herrick's latest book of poems is Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award. Juan Felipe Herrera says, "this is an incredible, luminous and most serious investigation, of being, of human suffering, of war and peace—of the factories of violence and the notebook of enlightenments.…Lee is concerned with the turning of beauty, the intimacy of death and the boundlessness of small moments, 'the broken body of a tiny bird,' fragments that can change a life." Herrick's previous poetry collections include Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of the anthology The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. His poems appear widely in literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies such as HERE: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form; and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. His prose has appeared in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017 and co-founded LitHop, Fresno's literary festival. He has traveled extensively throughout Latin America and Asia and has taught in China and in California State Prisons. He received the Bill F. Stewart Award for Excellence in Education in 2011. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the U.S. at ten months, he teaches at Fresno City College, where he co-founded the forthcoming Social Justice and Cultural Center, and in the Sierra Nevada University MFA program.


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21 MARCH 2021 — sunday

Maxima Kahn and Indigo Moor

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxima Kahn, Fierce Aria, and Indigo Moor, Everybody's Jonesin' for Something , online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, March 21 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Maxima Kahn and Indigo Moor via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After you register, you will receive an email invitation with a link to join the reading. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

Maxima Kahn's first full-length collection of poems is Fierce Aria. Annie Finch says, "I have learned to walk into the valley of my fears and losses," writes Maxima Kahn, and the evidence of what she has learned is all over these amazing poems. Fierce Aria is a book with a post-Wallace Stevens mission: to coax the still perfection of ideas out of the abstract realm, so they can take shape in the messy wilderness of reality. Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn's poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit." Kahn also writes poetry, essays and fiction. Her work has been featured in numerous literary journals, and on blogs such as The Creative Penn, Tiny Buddha, Positively Positive and The Startup; her own blog is Creative Sparks at BrilliantPlayground.com. She is also an improvisational violinist, a composer, and a dancer. She lives in the Sierra Nevada in California.

Indigo Moor's new book is Everybody's Jonesin' for Something, recipient of The Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Honorable Mention, University of Nebraska Press. Cornelius Eady says, "I strongly suggest you carry Moor's brilliant book, Everybody's Jonesin' for Something, home.…In this dazzling book, you will read just how closely this poet has been paying attention, to us, to his histories, foreign and domestic, to our mighty (and sometimes mighty confusing) nation. Jonesin' is a verse flashlight to all the corners you thought no one was supposed to pay attention to, line by beautifully crafted line, truth by earned truth. You'll reach the last line of the last poem, and trust me, that's when the hunger for more will begin." Also a scriptwriter, Moor is Poet Laureate emeritus of Sacramento. His other works include Tap-Root, Through the Stonecutter's Window (winner of the Northwestern University's Cave Canem Prize), and In the Room of Thirsts and Hungers: The Mirrored Tragedies of Paul Robeson and Othello.


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28 MARCH 2021 — sunday

Barbara Hamby and Barbara Ras

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Barbara Hamby, Holoholo, and Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, March 28 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Barbara Ras and Barbara Hamby via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

Barbara Ras's new book of poems is The Blues of Heaven, both personal, dealing with grief over the death of a brother and memories of growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Polish immigrants, and national, reflecting on gun violence, the climate crisis, and the fecklessness of an ignorant, corrupt government. Naomi Shihab Nye said, "The Blues of Heaven radiates with immense tenderness—here are poems of vivid painterly wonderment, perfect pacing and weight, elegantly woven counterpoints of shimmering imagery." Ras's previous collections include Bite Every Sorrow, winner of the Walt Whitman Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, One Hidden Stuff, and The Lost Skin. Her poetry has been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, Orion, and elsewhere, and she's been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is the founding director emerita of the Trinity University Press.

Barbara Hamby's new book of poems is Holoholo, the Hawaiian word for strolling without a fixed destination. A collage of one woman's consciousness, spoken in an American lingo, including Yiddish and street talk, its three sections motor across wars, racial tension, street violence, and other assorted national chaos. Billy Collins said, ""Barbara Hamby's poems are wild, outspoken, seriously funny, motor-mouth rambles that take us through hoops of association to places both unexpected and unimpeachable. This collection offers a generous helping of poems so crackling with references and busy with verbal energy you might feel them buzzing in your hands." She's the author of seven previous collections, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Her book of linked stories, Lester Higata's 20th Century, was the winner of the 2010 University of Iowa John Simmons Award. A 2010 Guggenheim fellow, she is also co-editor, with her husband David Kirby, of Seriously Funny, an anthology of poetry.


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11 APRIL 2021 — sunday

"Colossus: Home": Sarah Kobrinsky, D.L. Lang, Juanita J. Martin, Kim Shuck, Kimi Sugioka

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Sarah Kobrinsky, D.L. Lang, Juanita J. Martin, Kim Shuck, and Kimi Sugioka, current and former poet laureate contributors to Colossus: Home; the anthology addresses the Bay Area housing crisis, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


Colossus: Home, An Anthology of Lives In & Out of Place, edited by Sara Biel and Karla Brundage, presents poetry on the San Francisco Bay Area's housing crisis. These poets, all contributors to the anthology, are current or former Poet Laureates from across the Bay Area. You can purchase this exciting anthology at www.colossuspress.org/buy.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Sarah Kobrinsky's recent book is Nighttime on the Other Side of Everything. Jill McDonough says, "In Nighttime on the Other Side of Everything, Sarah Kobrinsky opens with a brief meditation on the imposter syndrome that also speaks to where all poems come from, anyway. Elsewhere we read 'I make. I tinker. I create. An instinct born/of my blueprints, deep within my DNA.' But these poems also come from us, from knowing what people say about kids looking like the milkman, pranks like TP-ing houses and tying shoelaces together, a recognizable rhythm of punchlines." Born in Canada, raised in North Dakota, seasoned in England, and tempered in California, she was the Poet Laureate of Emeryville, California, 2013-2015.
D.L. Lang is the former Poet Laureate of Vallejo, California, 2017-2019. She is the author of twelve poetry books, most recently Paradise Collectors: A Book of Jewish Poetry and Armor Against the Dawn: Poetry of Protest, and one spoken word album. She can be found behind a mic throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and at poetryebook.com.
Juanita J. Martin is Fairfield, California's first Poet Laureate, 2010-2012. Her poetry book is The Lighthouse Beckons. Her poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, SoMa Literary Review, Rattlesnake Review, and others; her nonfiction writing has appeared in Sonoma Discoveries Magazine. She was a longtime member of Redwood Writers, and is a current member of Napa Valley Writers, Benicia Writers Salon, Ina Coolbrith Circle, and Benicia First Tuesday Poets. When she isn't writing or volunteering, she reads on Vallejo Ozcat radio's ARTbeat. For more see www.jmartinpoetwriter.com.
Kim Shuck is San Francisco's seventh Poet Laureate, 2017-2020. Deer Trails, published by City Lights Books, is her most recent book. She is an Ani Yun Wiya (Cherokee)/Polish-American poet, author, weaver, and beadwork artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She earned an M.F.A. in Textiles from San Francisco State University. She is the winner of the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas and the Mary Tallmountain Award for Freedom Voices. She also received the Academy of American Poets National Laureate Fellowship and the Northern California Book Reviewers Groundbreaker Award.
Kimi Sugioka's newest poetry book is Wile & Wing. She is the current Poet Laureate of Alameda, California, 2020-2023. Anne Waldman said, "Kimi Sugioka is a poet with a lot of guises: maternal, witchy, passionate, detached observer…She moves through the female cycle confidently, poised, strong in her observance and power." Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator who performs her work frequently throughout the Bay Area. She has worked in public education for decades. She earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.


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25 APRIL 2021 — sunday

Terese Svoboda and Kristin George Bagdanov

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Kristin George Bagdanov, Diurne, and Terese Svoboda, Theatrix: Poetry Plays, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, April 25 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Terese Svoboda and Kristin George Bagdanov via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Kristin George Bagdanov's two books of poems, both published in 2019, are her debut, Fossils in the Making, and Diurne. Ilya Kaminsky says about Diurne, "Kristin George Bagdanov has a gift of being able to make lyrics from our daily moments; she finds depths where others see only surfaces; she finds mystery and sets that mystery to music.…This is an intricate, compelling, necessary work." A PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of California, Davis, she is also the senior poetry editor of Ruminate Magazine.
Terese Svoboda's new book of poems, her eighth, is Theatrix: Poetry Plays. Virginia Konchan says, "Not since Beckett has an existential soliloquy defined the task before us with such bravura: the way forward is brilliantly, bracingly clear." Her previous collections include Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems, and Weapons Grade. Among her many other publications are seven books of fiction: a biography, Anything That Burns You: Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, and a volume each of memoir and translation. She's won a Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, NEH grant for translation, Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, an O. Henry Award for short story, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She is also a Guggenheim fellow. Her opera WET premiered at L.A.'s Disney Hall in 2005.


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29 APRIL 2021 — thursday

Katie Peterson and Phyllis Stowell

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Katie Peterson, Life in a Field, and Phyllis Stowell, Transformations: Nearing the End of Life: Dreams and Visions, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Katie Peterson's brand new book of poems, to be released May 1, is Life in a Field, with photographer Young Suh. It is "a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time." Her previous book is A Piece of Good News; it was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry 2020. Library Journal says, "[A Piece of Good News] is written from the perspective of one who barely survived a devastating blow and is now ruminating on her loss. Coping with daily life, Peterson keeps an eye on the past…[using] words as a videographer employs details and images." Her work has been published in Journal of Alta California, Literary Imagination, and Poetry Northwest. Her other poetry collections are This One Tree, Permission, and The Accounts. She is professor and Chancellor's Fellow at the University of California, Davis, where she directs the MFA program in Creative Writing.

Phyllis Stowell's new book of poems is Transformations: Nearing the End of Life: Dreams and Visions. Patricia Berry says, "Phyllis Stowell documents the phenomena of aging by way of her personal process, including relevant details of her childhood and life. It comes alive like fiction—characters, voice, falling apart, the losses, frustrations, symptoms and pain, expressed also in poetic moments and poetry." She has authored eight collections of poetry and edited APPETITE, Food as Metaphor, An Anthology of Women's Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Poetry East, American Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly, Wallace Stevens Review, Columbia, Epoch, Phoebe, 13th Moon, Volt, and The Jung Journal. Professor Emerita at Saint Mary's College, she is also the former Chair of the Friends of the Institute (C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco). She lives in Berkeley.



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16 MAY 2021 — sunday

Terri Glass and Kathy Evans

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Kathy Evans, Trespassers Welcome, and Terri Glass, Being Animal, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Kathy Evans's new full-length collection is Trespassers Welcome. Molly Giles says, "I love following Kathy's quick and nimble steps as she dances through language." She has also published three chapbooks, Imagination Comes to Breakfast, As the Heart is Held, and Hunger and Sorrow. She's taught in California Poets in the Schools, and in many other venues, and been an artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. She is now poet-in-residence at Benioff Children's Hospital in Oakland and San Francisco.

Terri Glass's new full-length collection is Being Animal. Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge says, "Terri Glass celebrates, grieves, and finally embodies the hearts of animals in love poems that playfully and urgently encourage us to become all of who we are. Glass challenges us to enter our bodies like a bee that 'drops / into a poppy's cup.' 'What part of you…kills the flight of your imagination?' we are asked. Where do humans falter when we separate ourselves from the wild? Here animals become a metaphor for seeing new ways of being." She's also published a chapbook, Birds, Bees, Trees, Love, Hee Hee, and an e-book, The Wild Horse of Haiku: Beauty in a Changing Form, and a poetry and music CD, The Body of the Living Future. She is a writer of the natural world in poetry, including haiku, and in essays. Widely published in literary journals, her work has been anthologized in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, Earth Blessings, and elsewhere. She is a former director of California Poets in the Schools (2008-2011) and teaches in the program.


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23 MAY 2021 — sunday

Stella Beratlis and Dane Cervine

Poetry Flash presents a Sixteen Rivers Press poetry reading by Stella Beratlis, Dust Bowl Venus, and Dane Cervine, The World is God's Language, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, May 23 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Stella Beratlis and Dane Cervine via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings and at Small Press Distribution: www.spdbooks.org.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Join us for this celebration for Sixteen Rivers Press's two new collections!

Stella Beratlis's new book of poems is Dust Bowl Venus. Rosa Lane says, "Stella Beratlis's Dust Bowl Venus animates California's Central Valley as a postmodern Prometheus, an eco-sapient Frankenstein with whom we wrangle, wrestle, and fall madly in love." Her first book, Alkali Sink, was nominated for a Northern California Book Reviewers Award in 2016. Widely published in literary journals, her work has also been anthologized in The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. Poet Laureate of Modesto 2016-2020, she is co-editor of More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets.

Dane Cervine's new book of poems is The World Is God's Language, prose poems. Gary Young says, "Cervine reveals a sanctified world built of memory, history, and grace, where God is evanescent, transient but eternal, and where, Cervine makes clear, we are 'just visiting'" He's published six previous collections, most recently Earth Is a Fickle Dancer. His work has appeared in many journals and been anthologized in Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetics of California. He lives in Santa Cruz and works there as a therapist, where he's a former head of Children's Mental Health for Santa Cruz County.


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30 MAY 2021 — sunday

Lucille Lang Day and Iris Jamahl Dunkle

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Lucille Lang Day, Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, and Iris Jamahl Dunkle, West : Fire : Archive, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)


This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Lucille Lang Day's latest book of poems is Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place; David Roderick says, "Very few poets possess the acute observational power on display in Lucille Lang Day's Birds of San Pancho. In lyric, narrative, and meditative forms, Day's curiosity and love for the world radiate from every page." She's published six previous collections, most recently Becoming an Ancestor, and she's co-edited two anthologies, Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry from California. Her memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story was a finalist for the Northern California Book Reviewers Award in Creative Nonfiction. Other honors include the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature and two PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Literary Awards. Educated as a scientist as well as a writer–she holds a PhD in Science/Mathematics Education–she is also the founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle's new poetry collection is West : Fire : Archive. Gillian Conoley says of it, "…[this] magnificently wide-ranging new book traverses both ground and history to create a new genre: a dual biography (Charmian London's) and autobiography (the poet's own). Ultimately questioning what it is to be singular at the center of catastrophe and personal pain, equally at home with the known and the unknowable—beyond heritage, beyond gender—these poems offer the thrill of a newly discovered vista, while never straying far from our planet's formidable powers, our brief existence.…it is Dunkle's formidable twin characteristics of skepticism and heart that make this book so riveting and crucial as we step cautiously into the new frontier." Iris Jamahl Dunkle's previous poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies and There's a Ghost in This Machine of Air; she's also author of the new biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. She was the 2017–2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, California.


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20 JUNE 2021 — sunday

Norman Fischer and Linda Norton

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Norman Fischer, There was a clattering as…, and poememoirist Linda Norton, Wite Out: Love and Work, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, June 20 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Norman Fischer and Linda Norton via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings and at www.spdbooks.org/AdvancedSearch/DefaultWFilter.aspx?SearchTerm=norman+fischer.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Linda Norton's new memoir with poems is Wite Out: Love and Work. John Keene says, "With Wite Out Linda Norton breaks new ground as an autobiographical poememoirist. Combining an exploration of her familial roots, an interrogation and critique of whiteness as lived experience, a diaristic account of relationships in all their complexity, and a personal, social, and cultural history of certain precincts in American poetry's late twentieth century avant-garde. Wite Out is a masterpiece." Her previous collection, its prequel, The Public Gardens: Poems and History, introduction by Fanny Howe, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A recent East Bay Express review calls Wite Out "a must for anyone trying to understand the nuanced aggression of systemic oppression and how it affects the afflictor and afflicted in equal measure." Born in Boston, Norton lived in Brooklyn for many years before moving to Oakland, where she raised her daughter and met her foster son, who are the heart and soul of Wite Out. She's also a visual artist with a background in book publishing, oral history, and libraries and archives. She was a 2020 columnist-in-residence at SFMoMA's Open Space; you can see her essays, collages, and photographs at openspace.sfmoma,org/author/lindanorton and find her blog here: thepublicgardens.blogspot.com/2012/03/love-and-work.html.

Zen Buddhist priest and poet Norman Fischer's brand new book of poems is There was a clattering as…. Maged Zaher says, "Can you write about the plague without this writing being situational and somehow banal? Yes you can, There was a clattering as… is a poem about the plague, human condition, world materiality, soul fertility, and the mutual creation of God and human…This book is magnificent and as human as it could get." His other 2021 poetry title is Nature, "(a fractured re-do of Emerson) …about nature but also about thinking, language, identity, consciousness, science, idealism, economics, religion, and, in general, about the unsettling (in case you haven't noticed) paradox of being human in a human, non-human world." His other poetry books include any would be if, Untitled Series: Life As It Is, and On a Train At Night. His latest Buddhist books are The World Could be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path and When You Greet Me I Bow: notes and reflections from a life in Zen. His 2002 translation of the Hebrew psalms, Opening to You, is read by both Jews and Christians, and Experience: Essays on Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion was published in 2016.


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24 JUNE 2021 — thursday

Fog and Light: Vince Gotera, Ken Haas, Kathleen McClung, Diane Frank, more

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading to celebrate Fog and Light: San Francisco Through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here, a new anthology, with contributors Vince Gotera, Ken Haas, Jodi Hottel, Kathleen McClung, Gwynn O'Gara, and editor Diane Frank, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, June 24 at 7:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you this anthology celebration via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; Fog and Light is available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Many of these bio notes are from the Fog and Light anthology:
Vince Gotera's recent book is The Coolest Month, a collection of poems written everyday throughout April, in response to NaPoWriMo and Poem-a-Day prompts. Maureen Thorson says, "Vince Gotera's The Coolest Month leans into T. S. Eliot's bromide for April while turning it on its head.…An apple a day may keep the doctor away, but as Gotera shows, a poem a day can help chase away the blues." Now a professor in Iowa, Gotera was born and raised in San Francisco. He grew up in the Haight-Ashbury and was a teenager during the Summer of Love. "As a lead guitarist," Vince says, "I was influenced by the rock bands that played around The City: Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, The Charlatans, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, Santana, and many others. In fact, I fondly remember being an eighth grader at St. Agnes School on Ashbury and hearing The Dead rehearsing in their house across the street." Gotera left for grad school in the Midwest and hasn't lived in The City since. "But I am always excited to visit and enjoy the dazzling diversity, charming neighborhoods, and utter beauty of San Francisco, forever home."

Ken Haas's first full-length collection, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award. Ellen Bass said, "…Ken Haas's first collection of poems…is complex, vibrant, capacious and wildly imaginative. With affection and wonderful clarity, Haas describes a childhood of 'taking infield practice and shagging flies,' Atlantic City's 'sunburn and saltwater taffy,' a trip into Manhattan to see the legendary John Coltrane, who 'emptied his arms in a wave that even now speaks to the kind of man I could become.' But it would be a mistake to call this book nostalgic. Haas is keenly aware of the darker forces of history. The same Antisemitism that forced his grandparents to flee Nazi Germany is alive and well today—'we just forgot that shirt-wise brown is brown, words do burn, and we can see the rest from here.'" Haas's work has appeared in over fifty literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award. He grew up in New York City, but has lived for the past forty-four years in San Francisco.

Jodi Hottel is a sansei, third generation Japanese American. She is author of the chapbooks Out of the Ashes, Voyeur, and Heart Mountain, her collection of poems about the Japanese American incarceration, winner of the 2012 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. Most of those families were initially taken to a temporary detention site at the Tanforan race track in San Bruno, now the site of a shopping mall.

Kathleen McClung's books include Temporary Kin, Three Soul-Makers, A Juror Must Fold in on Herself, The Typists Play Monopoly, and Almost the Rowboat. Julie Kane wrote of Temporary Kin, " Kathleen McClung is a master of the sonnet crown. In her skilled hands, that venerable form expands to encompass active shooter drills, smartphones, and Lyft drivers, as well as songbirds, the sea, and the moon." She fell in love with San Francisco at age nine when she came with her mother on a Greyhound bus to see Carmen at the War Memorial Opera House. She cried when they had to leave at the intermission to catch the bus back to Sacramento. For over thirty years, Kathleen McClung has lived, taught, and written on the foggy west side of San Francisco.

Gwynn O'Gara's books include Snake Woman Poems, with a foreword by Nanos Valaoritis, and the chapbooks Fixer-Upper, Winter at Green Haven, Fruit of Life, and Sea Cradles. She grew up in San Francisco and left many times, almost always coming back. For twenty-five years she worked as a California Poet in the Schools and served as Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2010-2011.

Diane Frank is author of eight books of poems; her 2021 collection is While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems. Los P. Jones said this of Frank's 2018 book, Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines: "In this new and startling collection, Diane Frank's poems transcend not just genres but entire dimensions. When she speaks to J.S. Bach, she really means it and when Bach speaks back, she listens—entirely—the way certain moths perceive sound via their whole body, even their wings. How is this accomplished? It will seem to come through the poems themselves—their music, tonal qualities and subjects, yet it goes even deeper as it pushes up like duende through the soles of your feet." She is also the author of Blackberries in the Dream House, winner of the Chelson Award for Fiction, two other novels, and a photo memoir of her 400-mile trek in the Himalayas. She teaches at San Francisco State University and Dominican University and lives in the Outer Sunset in San Francisco, where she dances, plays cello, and creates her life as an art form. She selected the poems for the Fog and Light anthology.


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19 SEPTEMBER 2021 — sunday

Bruce Isaacson, Jan Steckel, Deborah Fruchey on Rudy Jon Tanner

Poetry Flash presents a virtual Zeitgeist Press poetry reading by Bruce Isaacson, Leningrad to Las Vegas, and Jan Steckel, Like Flesh Covers Bone; poet and editor Deborah Fruchey presents the late Rudy Jon Tanner's If Thirst is Proof of Water, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, September 19 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you this Zeitgeist Press event via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

The featured books are available at www.zeitgeist-press.com.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Deborah L. Fruchey's recent Zeitgest poetry collection is Three Kinds of Dark. Connie Post says, "A great new book from the well-known author of books, romances, and poems with emotional punch. The poems in this collection have verve, have a kick, and will leave your senses wanting more.…" Deborah Fruchey is also the author of Armadillo (poetry), two comedy romance novels, one self-help manual for the mentally ill, and Priestess of Secrets, a recent flash fiction collection. Her debut novel was chosen as a "Best Book" by the American Booksellers Association. A part of the Above Paradise and Café Babar scenes, her work appeared in the Babarian anthology, Poets from Hell. She edited If Thirst is Proof of Water, by the late Rudy Jon Tanner, and Our Lady of Telegraph Avenue, a tribute to the late poet Julia Vinograd.

Rudy Jon Tanner passed away in August 2021. If Thirst is Proof of Water, edited by Deborah Fruchey, is his first full-length collection, and was published in 2021 by Zeitgeist Press. Audio of him reading his own poetry will be presented at this event. Previously, he published two chapbooks, Picasso's Monkey, and The Accidental Beacons of Things Worn Away. Tanner studied piano and twentieth century composing at Oklahoma City University, where he also began writing poetry, while he continued to compose. He moved to California in 1980. He attended the Old Spaghetti Factory readings in North Beach, where he became friends with Julia Vinograd, along with her many friends who just happened to have a very natural talent for stunning poetry.

Jan Steckel's most recent book, Like Flesh Covers Bone, published by Zeitgeist Press, won the 2019 Rainbow Awards for LGBT Poetry and Best Bisexual Book. James Cagney says, "These poems have come for blood. Jan Steckel writes often humorous, always electrified poetry of great depth and courage. Take this journey!" Her poetry collection, The Horizontal Poet, won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. Her fiction chapbook, Mixing Tracks, and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital have also won awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

Bruce Isaacson's new book of poems is Leningrad to Las Vegas; Jack Hirschman says, "…a brilliantly composed novel in poems…very beautifully evoked…you will learn more about Russia soon after the end of the Soviet Union via Isaacson's terrific perceptions than you'll read anywhere." He is known here in the Bay Area both as a poet and the publisher of Zeitgeist Press, and is often associated with the Café Babar series, part of the SF spoken word revival of the 1980s. A graduate student with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College, he was a finalist in the inaugural season of the Nuyorican Poetry Slam. The first Poet Laureate of Clark County, Nevada whose two million population includes Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Strip, he is the founder of Poetry Promise, Inc., a non-profit whose mission is the advancement of the knowledge and practice of poetry. Isaacson is the author of several previous collections, including Ghosts Among the Neon and The Last Lie.


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14 OCTOBER 2021 — thursday

Gerald Fleming and Julia B. Levine

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Gerald Fleming, The Bastard and the Bishop, and Julia B. Levine, Ordinary Psalms, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, October 14 at 7:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Gerald Fleming and Julia B. Levine via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Gerald Fleming's new book of poems is The Bastard and the Bishop. Pablo Medina says of it, "The Bastard and the Bishop" is an awakening. Socially incisive and psychologically illuminating, it presents us with a full range of human passion and emotion. You didn't know prose could sing, poetry could mean? Read The Bastard and the Bishop and see for yourself." Master of the prose poem, Fleming's previous collections are One, monosyllabic prose poems; The Choreographer; Night of Pure Breathing; and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore. He is also the editor of The Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel. A teacher in the San Francisco public schools for thirty-seven years, he's published books for teachers and edited literary magazines.

Julia B. Levine's new book of poems is Ordinary Psalms. Library Journal wrote of it, "A polished poet of extraordinary skill…Levine is caught between wholehearted love of the world's beauty and sorrow at its unavoidable misery and suffering." She's published four previous collections, the most recent of which, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, was the winner of the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. She also received a Discovery/The Nation Award and a Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod. Her work has been widely published in journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and the Southern Review. She lives in Davis, California.


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11 NOVEMBER 2021 — thursday

Jan Beatty, Peter Kline, C. Dale Young

Poetry Flash presents a virtual reading by poets Jan Beatty, American Bastard: A Memoir and The Body Wars: Poems, Peter Kline, Mirrorforms, and C. Dale Young, Prometeo, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, November 11 at 7:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you this rare gathering of three compelling poets via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Jan Beatty's new book is American Bastard, winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Award 2021. A lyrical inquiry into the experience of being a bastard in America, it travels across literal continents—and continents of desire—as Beatty finds her birthfather, a Canadian hockey player who's won three Stanley Cups, and her birthmother, a working-class woman from Pittsburgh. Issues of class and struggle run throughout the memoir. Her sixth book is The Body Wars: Poems, University of Pittsburgh Press. Naomi Shihab Nye said in The New York Times: "Jan Beatty's new poems…shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters." Beatty's previous books include Jackknife: New and Collected Poems, winner of the Paterson Prize. Maria Mazziotti Gillan said, "Jackknife is a book that secures Jan's place in American literature as one of the fiercest and bravest poets writing today." Her work has appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, BuzzFeed, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.

Peter Kline's Mirrorforms is a daring, experimental collection of poems in which language reaches its most pressurized state. Kline has invented a new poetic form, the mirrorform, which he uses with musical verve to essentialize thought and intensify feeling. Bruce Snider says, "…Risky and formally inventive, playful yet rigorous, these poems work like mirrors facing one another; they give a sense of the infinite—the endless joys, losses, and mysteries that make our world." A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Peter Klein has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, Artsmith Orcas Island, and more. His previous book is Deviants; his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as Best New Poets, Verse Daily website, and the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and in Stanford University's Master of Liberal Arts Program.

C. Dale Young's new book is Prometeo, from Four Way Books. Ilya Kaminsky says, "Heartbreaking and beautiful is Prometeo, a book so eloquent the heart stops but refuses to stop reading. These are glorious poems in memoriam for friends, family members, patients. 'I have written too many elegies,' the poet says, 'the living have become jealous of the amount I have written for the dead.' Indeed, fellow poets must be jealous of this book's fearless spirit, of its music." C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time. He is also the author of a novel in stories, The Affliction, and four previous collections of poetry. He is a recipient of fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and more. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry.




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18 NOVEMBER 2021 — thursday

Doren Robbins and Susan Suntree

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Doren Robbins, Sympathetic Manifesto: Selected Poems 1975-2015, and Susan Suntree, Dear Traveler, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, November 18 at 7:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you this reading by two compelling poets via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Doren Robbins's new book of poems is Sympathetic Manifesto: Selected Poems 1975-2015. Dorianne Laux says, "What of the tired, the lost, the cast aside? We behold them all, revealed in their human complexity with tenderness, wit and rage throughout Robbins's work. His vision is necessary and vital…." A poet, mixed media artist, and essayist, he's published fifteen books. His monograph, Apocalypse Contemporary on Sharon Doubiago's book Naked to the Earth was published in 2020 as was Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences. His honors include the Blue Lynx Poetry Award, 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award. He's widely published in literary journals and is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and English at Foothill College in California.

Susan Suntree's brand new book of poetry is Dear Traveler. Marsha de la O said of it, Dear Traveler is a gorgeous poem-cycle as well as journey we all must make." Suntree's previous book, a non-fiction poem, Sacred Sites: The Secret History of Southern California, won the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetic Narrative, and a Mellon Foundation Elemental Arts Award. Her books and chapbooks include Eye of the Womb, also published in Madrid as a bilingual edition, El Ojo de la Matriz; Tulips, a bilingual chapbook of translations of poetry by Spanish poet Ana Rossetti; Rita Moreno; and Wisdom of the East: Stories of Compassion, Inspiration and Love, that she edited, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama. Suntree adapted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a poem set as a frequently performed choral work by award-winning composer Adrienne Albert (A Choral Quilt of Hope: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, and she has published essays and book chapters about activist theatre. Poetry Flash and Theatre Journal have published her reviews.




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21 NOVEMBER 2021 — sunday

Cathy Colman and Sam Sax

Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Cathy Colman, Time Crunch, and Sam Sax, Bury It, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, November 21 at 3:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you this event via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Cathy Colman's new book of poems is Time Crunch. Patricia Smith says, "The textured and lyrically lush narratives in Time Crunch—deftly-honed poems that titillate and resound long after their last lines—firmly establish Cathy Colman as a fierce and formidable voice destined to be a stalwart presence in the contemporary canon." Her first collection, Borrowed Dress, won the 2001 Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry and immediately made it to The Los Angeles Times Bestseller List; her second is Beauty's Tattoo. Other honors include a Browning Award for Poetry and the Ascher Montandon Award for Poetry. She's also been a reviewer for The New York Times Book Review.

Sam Sax's latest book of poems is Bury It. Tyehimba Jess says, "Bury It, Sam Sax's urgent, thriving excavation of desire, is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn.…A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously." Bury It received the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Their first collection, Madness, won the National Poetry Series. A queer Jewish writer and educator, they are a two-time Bay Area Grand Slam champion, and have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers.


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9 DECEMBER 2021 — thursday

Elena Karina Byrne and Gail Wronsky

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Elena Karina Byrne, If This Makes You Nervous, and Gail Wronsky, Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, December 9 at 7:00 pm PST! We are excited to bring you this compelling reading via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Elena Karina Byrne's new book is If This Makes You Nervous, a book of lyric poetry that responds to works of art. Molly Bendall says, "In this original and beguiling collection, Byrne offers us her private gallery and guides us through episodes of her life, revealing to us not only how works of art have instructed and nurtured her, but also how her life became imprinted on the art." A Pushcart Prize recipient, her previous books include No, Don't, Squander, MASQUE, and The Flammable Bird. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, Kyoto Journal, Verse Daily, Poetry International, Plume, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Volt, TriQuarterly, and BOMB. She's currently writing screenplays, short stories, and completing a collection of hybrid essays entitled "Voyeur Hour: Poetry, Art, Film, & Desire." Former Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena Karina Byrne is a freelance editor and lecturer, Programming Consultant & Stage Manager for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, poetry programs curator for the Craft Contemporary Museum, and literary programs director for The Ruskin Art Club.

Gail Wronsky's new book is Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems David St. John says, "Gail Wronsky is an astonishing poet whose work I've turned to for more than twenty-five years to find the most deeply compassionate, artistically complex and intellectually astute poetry being written in this country. She is a literary revisionist of the most exquisite order, reconstructing the poetic canon, challenging the historical conventions of poetry and striking urgent, lyric chords of female empowerment. …With this book she takes her rightful place among the most celebrated of American poets." Her previous poetry collections include Imperfect Pastorals, Poems for Infidels, and Dying for Beauty (finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Prize). She is the translator of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy's book Fuegos Florales/Flowering Fires, winner of the American Poetry Prize from Settlement House Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Antioch Review, Poetry International, and Volt. Her work has appeared in anthologies, including Poets Against War, The Black Body, In Possession of Shakespeare, The Poet's Child, and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles.


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16 DECEMBER 2021 — thursday

Jack Foley, Sangye Land, and Deborah Bachels Schmidt

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Jack Foley, When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs, with Sangye Land, and Deborah Bachels Schmidt, Stumbling Into Grace, online via Zoom, free, 7:00 pm PST (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)

Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Thursday, December 16 at 7:00 pm PST! We are pleased to bring you this exciting reading via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the event. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; Jack Foley's books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings. For Deborah Schmidt's new book see https://orchpress.com/index.php/en/new-publications2.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Jack Foley will read and perform with Sangye Land. His new book of poetry is When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs, poems ranging from traditional to experimental verse; and the companion volumes, The Light of Evening, a brief autobiography, "A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads," a book about the growth—the autobiography—of the octogenarian poet's mind, and Grief Songs, dealing with his sorrow at his wife's death. Micah Zevin said, "Foley's When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs is a collection that speaks multitudes, gives voice and voices to the human condition in all its tragic and celebratory facets, compels us to keep singing until the last song is sung." Foley has published seventeen books of poetry, five books of criticism, a book of stories, and a 1,300-page "chronoencyclopedia," Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry 1940-2005. With his late wife, Adelle he became known for his multi-voiced "choruses," a practice he has continued with his new life partner, Sangye Land. He has presented poetry on Berkeley, California radio station KPFA regularly since 1988 and is currently one of the hosts of KPFA's literary program, "Cover to Cover." He received the Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and June 5, 2010 was declared "Jack Foley Day" in Berkeley.

Deborah Bachels Schmidt's brand new chapbook is Stumbling Into Grace. Diane Frank said, "In these pandemic times, the world needs poems that provide vision, joy and grace. Stumbling Into Grace by Deborah Bachels Schmidt provides this kind of elixir. From the first poem through the narrative arc of her book, we receive a mythology of our times, full of ancient wisdom." A Pushcart Prize nominee, Schmidt is also the author of The Milky Breath of Stars, poems; a memoir about growing up in Taos, Land of My Enchantment; a children's book; and two genealogical adventures, The Bible, the Ship and the Pewter Plate and The Menorah in the Closet. She was awarded First Prize in the Sonnet category by the Soul-making Keats Literary Competition. Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, California Quarterly, The Lyric, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere.


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