2022 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.

6 FEBRUARY 2022 — sunday

Tobey Hiller and Maw Shein Win

Poetry Flash presents a virtual book launch reading by Tobey Hiller, Flight Advice: a fabulary, stories, with Maw Shein Win, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, poems, 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 launch reading on Sunday, February 6 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; Maw Shein Win's Storage Unit for the Spirit House is available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings. Tobey Hiller's Flight Advice is available at: www.unlikelystories.org/unlikely-books/flight-advice.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Tobey Hiller's new collection of stories is Flight Advice: a fabulary. Thaisa Frank says, "In Flight Advice, fairy tales and myths of passion come alive in the modern world: Men with cigarettes that look like stars make love to mermaids, a genie appears in a woman's laundry room, and a writer is transformed by mysterious words. Told by a narrator with a remarkable voice that ranges from vernacular clarity to dazzling lyricism, Flight Advice is the best of contemporary magic realism." Hiller's previous books include four poetry books, most recently Crow Mind; a novel; and a work of nonfiction. Her story "Splinter" won First Prize in Craft's 2020 Short Story Elements Contest and was earlier short-listed for the first Los Gatos-Listowel Short Story Contest; "The Seventh Blue" was a finalist for the Reynolds Price Short Fiction Award. Two of her other stories have been short-listed for prizes, and Flight Advice: a fabulary was one of five finalists for Omnidawn Publishers's Fabulist Fiction Prize under the name "Particle to Wave: a fabulary." Her fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Able Muse Review, Ambush Review, Askew, Canary, The Fabulist: Words & Art, North Coast Literary Review, Sisyphus, Sin Fronteras, Spillway, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California.

Maw Shein Win's recent poetry book is Storage Unit for the Spirit House, nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, long-listed for the PEN America Open Book Award, and short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. D.A. Powell wrote of it, "Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions, keepsakes. This piercing, gorgeous collection stands both inside and outside of containment: the porcelain vase of stargazer lilies is considered alongside the galley convicts, the children sleeping on the cement floors of detention cells, the nats inside their spirit houses; the spirit houses inside their storage units.…These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely, and resilient book." Maw Shein Win's previous collections include Invisible Gifts; her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of the City of El Cerrito (2016-2018). She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and was a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley.

6 MARCH 2022 — sunday

Ralph Dranow and Judy Wells

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Ralph Dranow, presenting At Work on the Garments of Refuge, his own poems with poems and art by the late Daniel Marlin, reading with poet Judy Wells, Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, 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 launch reading on Sunday, March 6 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley; Ralph Dranow's At Work on the Garments of Refuge is available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings. Judy Well's Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West is available at: sugartownpublishing.com/titles_and_ordering/back_list.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Ralph Dranow is co-author, with the late poet and artist Daniel Marlin, of At Work on the Garments of Refuge. Gary Turchin says, "This is an exquisite book of poetry crafted by two fine poets who were best friends. Daniel Marlin, now deceased, wrote soul-stirring poems, simple, elegant, thoughtful and inspired. They're filled with dharma and the drama of real life. No subject is taboo, but each subject is handled with the deftest of touches. This is a man who had a gift for language but never over did it…always stayed grounded and real. He let his experience guide him and not his ideas.…Marlin and Dranow matured together as writers and this is the culmination of their mutual admiration." In 1978, Ralph Dranow and Daniel Marlin met while working at the Oakland, California main post office. They hit it off immediately, finding a common passion for writing and concern for social justice. Their nascent friendship took root on the level of deep mutual caring as well as support for each other's writing. They formed a writing group that lasted thirty-eight years, and continues today with new members.
Ralph Dranow is an editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach as well as a poet specializing in people's stories. He has published eight poetry books including A New Life, one short-story collection, and numerous poems and articles in magazines and newspapers: www.ralphdranow.net.
Daniel Marlin (1945-2017) was a poet, artist, translator, and peace activist. He traveled extensively, spending much time in Japan, where his wife, Toshiko, was born. His book Heart of Ardor contains over three-hundred-images of his vibrant paintings and drawings, along with commentary about his artwork. His other books include Jerusalem and the Boardwalk, Amagasaki Sketchbook, and Isaiah at the Wall: Palestine Poems.

Judy Wells newest poetry book is Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West. Lucille Lang Day says, "Go West, young man,' is the famous command, but many young women also heeded this advice. Among them were Judy Wells' great-grandmother Phebe Marsh Dickinson and her two sisters, distant cousins of Emily Dickinson, who came to California from Massachusetts in the late 19th century. In Dear Phebe, Wells chronicles their stories in poetry and prose." Dear Phebe is neither traditional autobiography nor strict genealogy. Letters and historical facts are turned into poems, and anecdotes become grist for the mill. As historian Lauren Coodley says, "This book is a wholly new form, fusing history and poetry, inspiring both disciplines." Bridget Connelly comments, "I loved every twist and turn of this mind-tripping story and laughed with glee when the author ends up returning her great-grandmother Phebe's one-hundred-year-overdue book to the San Francisco Public Library." Judy Wells is the author of eleven previous collections of poetry, including Everything Irish, Call Home, and The Glass Ship. She lives with her husband, avant-garde poet Dale Jensen, in Berkeley.

10 APRIL 2022 — sunday

Dorothy Gilbert and Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and translator Dorothy Gilbert, Fox Woman, with poet and Jungian analyst Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Death and His Lorca, 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 launch reading on Sunday, April 10 at 3:00 pm PDT. 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley. Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's Death and His Lorca is available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings. Dorothy Gilbert's Fox Woman is available at: sugartownpublishing.com/titles_and_ordering.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Dorothy Gilbert's new poetry collection is Fox Woman. Robert Alter says, "The world becomes magical and often mysterious in Dorothy Gilbert's poems. Landscapes, cityscapes, ordinary domestic settings, and, above all, the presences of nature show forth in a fresh light. The language of the poems is vigorous and musical, its diction bracingly compact, and abounding in little revelatory surprises. This is a book that readers who care about poetry should cherish." Dorothy Gilbert's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Iowa Review, and other print and online publications from Poetry Flash to Persimmon Tree. Her translations are included in The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and she has published two translations from twelfth-century Old French: Erec and Enide, the first known Arthurian romance, and Marie de France: Poetry. She received the Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation and an award from the Columbia University Translation Center. She has also published criticism, journalism, and science fiction.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's fifth poetry book is Death and His Lorca. Susan Terris says, "Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's [new book] is a powerful volume of poems about love, about loss but also about how lost ones still stream indelibly through a life. Again and again, Lorca's passion and Lowinsky's intertwine, adding a memorable musical lyric to the whole book." Death and His Lorca includes Lowinsky's strongest work from the last two decades, it is "at once archetypal, personal, political and influenced by the great Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, whose understanding of duende—involving the presence of death—became the magnet for the poems in this collection. The dead show up as late kin, late friends, ancestors, tricksters, spirit guides and oracles." Her poetry books include Dreaming Night Terrors, The Faust Woman Poems, and Adagio & Lamentation; her memoir is The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way. She is the author of numerous prose essays, many published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. She is also co-editor of Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way. A member of the San Francisco Institute, for years she led Deep River, a writing circle there. She is a Jungian analyst in private practice.

21 APRIL 2022 — thursday

Sandra M. Gilbert and Phyllis Stowell

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Sandra M. Gilbert, Judgment Day, and Phyllis Stowell, Threshold State, 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, April 21, at 7:00 pm PDT. We are pleased to bring you this exciting event via Zoom. To register, 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. Search for Sandra M. Gilbert's book at https://bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings. For Phyllis Stowell's new book, see https://kelsaybooks.com/products/threshold-state?_pos=2&_sid=df649c847&_ss=r.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Sandra M. Gilbert's tenth book of poetry is Judgment Day. Marilyn Hacker said, "Judgment Day, with formal virtuosity, explores food and its multiple cultural meanings, infuses a series of ekphrastic poems with history often includes love lyric and elegy in one poem, gives us politically charged narratives of childhood and young womanhood in New York, and a wry and revolutionary look at an aging body still desiring, desired, and in motion." Sandra M. Gilbert is renowned for her collaborative critical work with Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, widely recognized as a central text of second-wave feminism. Carolyn See called it "a masterpiece" in Los Angeles Times Book Review. Gilbert co-edited The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, and co-authored No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the 20th Century, among other works. Sandra Gilbert edited Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, from the courageous political prose of poet Adrienne Rich. Gilbert has received many honors, including the Northern California Book Awards's Fred Cody Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Phyllis Stowell's new book of poetry is Threshold State. Alan Williamson said of it, "When I read Phyllis Stowell's poetry, I am first struck by the beauty of the sound-play—a dimension undervalued by so many contemporary poets. Then by her unflinching confrontation with the theme that must come to the fore for all poets if they live long enough: the confrontation with the Void. Like the great poets of old age—I think particularly of Stevens—Stowell records both the horror and the glimpses of a possible transcendence." Phyllis Stowell's previous books of poems include Einstein's Knot and Transformations: Nearing the End of Life: Dreams and Visions. She has authored numerous 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. She is former Chair of the Friends of the Institute (C.G. Jung Institute, San Francisco). She lives in Berkeley.

28 APRIL 2022 — thursday

Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Kathleen Winter

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Gatherer's Alphabet, and Kathleen Winter, Cat's Tongue, 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)

Join us on Thursday, April 28, at 7:00 pm PDT for an exciting reading via Zoom. To register for this event, 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.

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

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Susan Kelly-DeWitt, a visual artist as well as a poet, reads to launch her new book, Gatherer's Alphabet, also the first book in the Gunpowder Press California Poets Series. Sandra McPherson says, "Susan Kelly-DeWitt's concentrations come to life as if in a studio, with watercolor washes and ink accentuations. As well as mother and father, ghosts and angels, words are animated characters urgently communicating—whistling to animals or dogwood gods, pinches of anger too—a tool to save us. Is she holding a pen—or a moth by its wings? Poems like "Words" and "The Thorne Miniatures" and the title poem gaze multi-eyed at the reader from the palm of her offering hand." Susan Kelly-DeWitt's books include Gravitational Tug, Spider Season, and The Fortunate Islands. She is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow whose work appears in many anthologies, and in print and online journals at home and abroad. She has been a reviewer for Library Journal, editor of the online journal Perihelion, Program Director for the Sacramento Poetry Center and the Women's Wisdom Arts Program, a Poet in the Schools and in the Prisons, and a blogger for Coal Hill Review. A Poetry Flash Contributing Editor, she is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and Northern California Book Reviewers.

Kathleen Winter's new chapbook is Cat's Tongue. W. Todd Kaneko says of it, "In [this] new collection, memory is a thing to encounter untamed, to be rediscovered and confronted before it's lost again. These poems 'go backwards / in experience, subtracting yes from yes' as they unearth secrets and regrets and yearnings, as they reckon the past with the present. Through the glint and gloom of memory, these poems portray the self in all its strength and grief, all with Winter's trademark keenness and lyrical grace." Kathleen Winter's previous books include Transformer, finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and I will not kick my friends, winner of the 2017 Elixir Poetry Prize. Her first book, Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, won the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Award, the Antivenom Prize, and the Poetry Society of America's The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in The New Republic, New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Five Points, and Poetry London.

22 MAY 2022 — sunday

D. Nurkse and Erin Rodoni

Poetry Flash presents a reading by D. Nurkse, A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, and Erin Rodoni, And If the Woods Carry You, 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 launch reading on Sunday, May 22 at 3:00 pm PDT. 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley. Featured books for this reading are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
D. Nurkse's new collection is A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, stretching over thirty-five years. In it, one of our most essential poets "casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart's hidden stories." He is author of eleven previous collections, including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Ilya Kaminsky says, "What a joy to have this overview of D. Nurske's marvelous poems—he is a master of lyric mode, one in whose hands the lines come immediately come alive, magic breathes, nuance shimmers and becomes the world all its own, see the doors open into the unknown and we see that it is strangely familiar because strangeness is, in fact, our first language, one we mouthed before words." Nurkse's many honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review; he has taught poetry in prison, and, as Brooklyn Poet Laureate, in local schools and the public library system. He has also worked for human rights organizations. A resident of Brooklyn, he currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Erin Rodoni's new book is And If the Woods Carry You, winner of the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. "On the brink of climate catastrophe, a mother grappling with her choice to bring children into an apocalyptic world sends her daughters into the woods of fairy tale as a rite of initiation. The woods carry her fears of extinction—devastating fires, rising seas, and the predatory dangers of girlhood—but also contain the transformative magic of love, interdependence, and renewal." Her previous collections include Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss, winner of the Stevens Award from the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Sandra Alcosser said of Body, in Good Light, "A reader slips into this delicate and gracious book of poems as if into an estuary, subject to the waxing and waning of its subtle currents. Erin Rodoni's generous spirit flows forward as she creates her vision through exquisite and mysterious poems." Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Blackbird, EcoTheo Review, Colorado Review, and Poetry Northwest. She has been honored with awards from the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, The Montreal International Poetry Prize, and Ninth Letter. She teaches at the Writing Salon in San Francisco.

12 JUNE 2022 — sunday

John Sibley Williams, Rusty Morrison, Alexis Sears

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Rusty Morrison, Beyond the Chainlink, John Sibley Williams, Scale Model of a Country at Dawn, Cider Press Review Book Award-winner and The Drowning House, Elixir Press Poetry Award-winner, with Alexis Sears, Out of Order, Donald Justice Poetry Prize-winner, 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 12 at 3:00 pm PDT. 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley. Featured books for this reading are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Rusty Morrison's most recent collection, Beyond the Chainlink, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Library Journal wrote, "As these eloquent, perfectly faceted poems attest, life is at heart our burningly patient negotiation with the everyday. We're followed by 'dangerous ideas,' risk the 'little hurt' of impulse, attempt to construct meaning (even in the backyard), and always, always desire ('This wanting, a pocket mirror I'll rub / until the silver backing rubs off.') James Laughlin Award-winner Morrison delivers poetry that feels affirmative, radiant, and lived." Her previous books include After Urgency, Tupelo's Dorset Prize-winner, the true keeps calm biding its story, winner of the Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Prize, James Laughlin Award, Northern California Book Award, and DiCastagnola Award. She is a recipient of a Civitella Ranieri fellowship, and other artist retreat fellowships. She was one of eight fellows in the 2020 UC Berkeley Art Research Center's Poetry and the Senses Program. Co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishers, she teaches and offers writing consultations.

Alexis Sears's debut collection is Out of Order, winner of the 2021 Donald Justice Poetry Prize. David Yezzi says, "If you have never read Alexis Sears, prepare yourself. Her poems draw blood. It's hard to think of a debut collection since Heart's Needle [by W.D Snodgrass] that is at once so deeply felt and so finely tuned. In her hands, form is the fist that delivers the blow, conveying the pure force of language. With so much at stake—identity, melancholia, a father's suicide in a distant place—feeling could easily overwhelm and blur, but Sears's poems remain precise and richly textured. Her poems do not succumb; they triumph, as we do, thrillingly, through them." She earned her BA in Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and her MFA in poetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work has appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Northwest Review, Poet Lore, E-verse Radio, Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Best American Poetry 2022, minnesota review, Cimarron Review, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She is poetry editor of the online literary journal, Up North Lit.

John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Poetry Award). Susan Rich says, "To conjure is a recurring theme in this impressive collection—as if language holds the power to reconfigure a past, a mother, a child. And perhaps it can. Williams's words are that convincing." His books include The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award), As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press), and Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize). His collection, Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems, is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. A twenty-seven-time Pushcart nominee, Williams is the winner of numerous other awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and is founder of the Caesura Poetry Workshop series. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Verse Daily, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and TriQuarterly.

23 JUNE 2022 — thursday

Leila Chatti and Lubna Safi

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Lubna Safi, Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, Walt McDonald First Book Poetry Prize-winner, and Leila Chatti, Deluge and , The Mothers: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation, co-authored with Dorianne Laux, 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 23, at 7:00 pm PDT. We are pleased to bring you this exciting event via Zoom. To register, 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.

Featured books for this reading are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash, www.writerscenter.org/product/the-mothers, and at Texas Tech University Press, www.ttupress.org/search-results/?supapress_order=publishdate-desc&page_number=2. This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley.
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MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Leila Chatti's debut full-length collection is Deluge, winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Naomi Shihab Nye said in The New York Times, "To write a series of poems out of extreme illness is a bracing accomplishment indeed. In Deluge…, Leila Chatti, born of a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, brilliantly explores the trauma. In a frightening two-year saga of a tumor and the 'flooding' it caused, Chatti finds not disassociation but deeper association with her own experience." She is also co- author of The Mothers: Poems in Conversation & A Conversation, a chapbook, with Dorianne Laux, and other chapbooks. Tunisian-American dual citizen born in Oakland, Chatti has lived in the United States, Tunisia, and Southern France. Her poems have received prizes from Ploughshares's Emerging Writer's Contest, Narrative's 30 Below Contest, Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize, among others, and appear in The New York Times Magazine, Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, POETRY, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Tin House, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets.

Lubna Safi's debut poetry collection is Your Blue and the Quiet Lament, winner of the Walt McDonald Prize First-Book Series in Poetry. Texas Tech University Press says, "Your Blue and the Quiet Lament records the textures of grief after a cousin's murder at the hands of the Syrian state reaches the poet through a long-distance phone call. The poems trace a narrative of arrest, imprisonment, and torture in Syria and interweave the difficulties a family experiences in the diaspora. Shifting between the death of poet Federico García Lorca and that of her cousin, Lubna's poetry contends with personal loss by distancing the meaning of one death through the intermediary of another. Yet the distortion of distance is already there—in the language, in the geographic space, in time, in the grief itself—tinged with blue." Along with poetry, Lubna Safi also writes fiction, literary criticism, and lyric essays. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Journal, MIZNA, and elsewhere. She is currently completing a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.

26 JUNE 2022 — sunday

Steven Rood, Richard Silberg, James M. LeCuyer

Poetry Flash presents a reading by short story writer James M. Lecuyer, Duck Lessons, Richard Silberg, Associate Editor of Poetry Flash, and Steven Rood, Naming the Wind, Omnidawn Publishers, 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 virtual reading on Sunday, June 26 at 3:00 pm PDT. 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley. Featured books for this reading are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. James LeCuyer's Stories for Clever Children can be found at ravenandwrenpress.com/raven-wren-bookstore.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
James M. LeCuyer is a fiction writer, educator, and poet. His short story books include Duck Lessons and Threnody for Sturgeon. Lucille Lang Day says, "James LeCuyer's stories, rich with humor and imagination, provide insight into all stages of life…and his keen ear for dialogue enables him to bring a wide range of characters to life: fishermen, teachers, lovers, graduate students, spunky children, insolent teens. Whether writing poetically or satirically, he gives us stories that are fully realized and a great pleasure to read." His newest collection, Stories for Clever Children & All Curious and Thoughtful Adults, began as tales he spun for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. LeCuyer holds three Masters degrees, has served in the United States Navy, worked as a commercial halibut and herring fisherman, a taxi driver, a report writer for the Berkeley Police Department, a technical writer and editor for UC Berkeley, and as a high school English teacher at School of the Arts in San Francisco.

Steven Rood is a poet and practicing trial lawyer. His new collection is Naming the Wind. C.S. Giscombe says, "Late in this ranging and wild book, …Steven Rood offers this in response to an older poet's challenge—'I have power, depth, fear / as my tones, and uncertainty as my shape.' And the beauty and the multiplicity of uncertainties—that call, that calling forth—is what this book stakes its being on." The publisher, Omnidawn, notes: "Wind moves through this collection, opening the poems to the dying beauty of the natural world, to the weathers inside the psyche and without, and to the connections between a family and between the speaker and his mentor, the great poet Jack Gilbert. The collection navigates the intimacies of human relationships with others, the challenges of working as a lawyer trying to maintain integrity as others fall prey to corporate greed, and the complexity of holding a Jewish identity while being awake to tradition's hold on the mind and its cost." An earlier iteration of the manuscript for this book was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist. Rood's poems appear in Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric, Hayden's Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, The Marlboro Review, The Atlanta Review, The Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Richard Silberg is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Horses: New and Selected Poems and Deconstruction of the Blues, recipient of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award and Northern California Book Award finalist. D. Nurkse says, "Dynamic, kaleidoscopic, shot through with a thousand faces and voices too real to be characters, Richard Silberg's work is a Chaucerian pilgrimage to strange and uncannily familiar places—Fremont, the Lower East Side, 'the humped island of Mind.' The Horses is a journey that dazzles wherever it goes as Silberg, 'an ecstatic balding older man / in a striped tee shirt,' slips into words and finds a way to make them accelerate, plummet, and soar. The goal is a new self, a way to ride out the old isms towards a possible future. The Horses is a deeply serious, wild, and powerful contribution to American letters." He co-translated, with Clare You, The Three Way Tavern, by Ko Un, Northern California Book Award-winner in Translation; Flowers Long For Stars, by Oh Sae-Young; This Side of Time, by Ko Un; and I Must Be the Wind, by Moon Chung-Hee. His poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Parthenon West Review, ZYZZYVA, and New American Writing. Richard Silberg is Associate Editor of Poetry Flash.

24 JULY 2022 — sunday

D. Nurkse and Eliot Schain

Poetry Flash presents a reading by D. Nurkse, A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, and Eliot Schain, The Distant Sound, 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 virtual reading on Sunday, July 24 at 3:00 pm PDT. 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.

This reading is co-sponsored by Moe's Books in Berkeley. Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
This reading was rescheduled from May 22. D. Nurkse's new collection is A Country of Strangers: New and Selected Poems, stretching over thirty-five years. In it, one of our most essential poets "casts a clear eye on our politics, our places, and our heart's hidden stories." He is author of eleven previous collections, including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult. Ilya Kaminsky says, "What a joy to have this overview of D. Nurske's marvelous poems—he is a master of lyric mode, one in whose hands the lines come immediately come alive, magic breathes, nuance shimmers and becomes the world all its own, see the doors open into the unknown and we see that it is strangely familiar because strangeness is, in fact, our first language, one we mouthed before words." Nurkse's many honors include a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His poems have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review; he has taught poetry in prison, and, as Brooklyn Poet Laureate, in local schools and the public library system. He has also worked for human rights organizations. A resident of Brooklyn, he currently teaches in the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Eliot Schain most recent collection is The Distant Sound. Bruce Isaacson says, "An unforgettable modern voice…in Schain's poetry, the inexhaustible American hunger confronts its limits—wilderness defiled by industry, the nuclear family gone ballistic, love turned impossible. Here wisdom and madness live side-by-side, take the reader's hand, and walks us toward the uncertain future. Once you have heard his cadences, you will not forget." Eliot Schain's previous books are American Romance and Westering Angels, both from Zeitgeist Press. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa Monica Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Miramar, among other journals, and four anthologies: America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience; The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California; and Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees.
He has served as program director for the Poetry Society of American, taught high school, and is now a psychotherapist in Berkeley, California.

10 NOVEMBER 2022 — thursday

David Baker and Rebecca Foust

Poetry Flash presents reading by David Baker, Whale Fall, and Rebecca Foust, Only, in-person, Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, masks are encouraged, free, 7:00 pm PST (510-649-1320, www.pegasusbookstore.com/pegasus-downtown; Poetry Flash: 510-525-5476)


Books will be available for purchase and signing at the in-person event, and are also online at: bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Acclaimed poet, educator, editor, and literary critic David Baker's new book of poetry is Whale Fall. He is the author or editor of nineteen books, and was poetry editor of The Kenyon Review for more than twenty-five years; he now curates the "Nature's Nature" feature for the magazine. Diane Seuss wrote in The Paris Review, "The craft of Whale Fall defies. It asserts, for me, a definition of poetry: an unbearable gulf of feeling made indelible by form." Linda Gregerson says, "From the shadow of the garfish to the memory of seabed in Ohio sandstone, nothing appears to be too slight or too immense for David Baker's powers of lyric transformation." His previous collections of poetry include Swift: New and Selected Poems, Scavenger Loop, Never-Ending Birds, which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and Midwest Eclogue. Among his numerous honors are prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, the Pushcart Foundation, and many more. He teaches at Denison University, and lives in Granville, Ohio.

Rebecca Foust's new poetry collection is Only. Ellen Bass says, "In Only, her luminous new collection of poems, Rebecca Foust's gifts are in full flower. Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical, these poems wrestle with the big questions—religion, immigration, climate change, politics, parenting, autism, and death—all on a deeply intimate level. Like an impressionist painter, she uses light to capture the immediacy of the present, the passage of time. Foust's most remarkable gift is showing us '…the world as it is: gorgeous in its mortal wound.'" She is the author of three previous collections, Paradise Drive, All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song, and, in collaboration with Lorna Stevens, God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World, and three chapbooks, including The Unexpected Ordnance Bin. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar, the 2017-2019 Marin County Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, and MacDowell.

13 NOVEMBER 2022 — sunday

Rosanna Warren and Daniel Wolff

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Rosanna Warren, So Forth: Poems, and Daniel Wolff, More Poems about Money, 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 virtual reading on Sunday, November 13 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.

Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Rosanna Warren is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her recent collection is So Forth: Poems. Katie Peterson says, "This is a book of love and war, rich with poems of desire and rage, situated in our nearly unbearable historical moment, alive to its challenges and pleasures. Rosanna Warren uses passion and calculation in equal measure to grapple with an uncertain future—in this, she is the best of citizens, loving her world in the midst of fierce disenchantment." Rosanna Warren's previous books are Earthworks: Selected Poems; Ghost in a Red Hat, A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011; and Departure. Her literary criticism includes Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry; and she is co-translator of Suppliant Women, by Euripides. She is the recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets, American Academy of Arts & Letters, and Guggenheim Foundation, among others.

Daniel Wolff's new collection is More Poems about Money. Bob Holman says, "There's no money in poetry. But there's no poetry in money, either,' quoth Robert Graves, but this collection by Daniel Wolff certainly contradicts that notion. From dives into economic theories to exploring real life contradictions like Cuba's dual monetary system, Wolff advocates always for poetry, which surely exists only as a Gift Economy. And this book is indeed a gift for readers ready to savor the destruction of dollars and doubloons and the power of language in the service of imagination." His previous poetry collections include The Names of Birds, Work Sonnets, and The Real World. He is also the author of nonfiction books including Grown Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913, How Lincoln Learned to Read, The Fight for Home: How (Parts of ) New Orleans Came Back, and Fourth of July, Asbury Park . His work has appeared in DoubleTake, The Paris Review, and Threepenny Review.

20 NOVEMBER 2022 — sunday

Jose Antonio Villarán and Sesshu Foster

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Jose Antonio Villarán, Open Pit, and Sesshu Foster, City of the Future, 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)


Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Jose Antonio Villarán's new collection is Open Pit. He is author of two previous collections, including la distancia es siempre la misma and el cerrajero. He is also author of one book of translation, Album of Fences, by Omar Pimienta. Sandra and Ben Doller say, "Jose Antonio Villarán's Open Pit affectively pits global addictions against personal extractions, calculating the enormous human and environmental weight of techno-privilege. Hurtling down the superhighway of forms—the ocean on one side, the desert on the other—the poems in this book accumulate into a desperate investigation of complicity, commodity, and heredity, as they swerve from Sacramento to San Diego to Lima to China to dust. The open pit of the title—of the exploited town of Morococha, of the raided earth itself—echoes and plumbs as it is stripped bare, as it is offered to the poet's young son Miqel, the future. This text is a necessary addition to the canon of disembordered political poetry which, here, honestly acknowledging its own limits, dilates the aperture." He holds an MFA in Writing from UC San Diego and is a PhD candidate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz.

Sesshu Foster is a poet, novelist, and veteran public school teacher. Foster's most recent poetry collection, City of the Future, is "the poetic soundtrack of a people and a place, of their history and their dreams." He is co-author, with artist Arturo Romo, of the surrealist, multigenre novel ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Ben Ehrenreich says "ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come." Foster has taught writing in East Los Angeles, at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. Foster earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Alhambra, California.

4 DECEMBER 2022 — sunday

Sharon Dolin and Kelli Russell Agodon

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Sharon Dolin, Imperfect Present, and Kelli Russell Agodon, Dialogues with Rising Tides, 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)


Featured books for this event are available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Sharon Dolin's new poetry collection is Imperfect Present. Ellen Bass says, "There are many ways to describe Imperfect Present, Sharon Dolin's new collection of poems—delightful, earthy, erudite, engaging—but dazzling says it best. A master of form, Dolin offers a prismatic, often intimate, look at origins: language, country, belief, the self." Her previous poetry books include Manual for Living, Whirlwind, and Burn and Dodge, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Dolin is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize-winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. She lives in New York City, where she teaches poetry workshops and is associate editor of Barrow Street Press.

Kelli Russell Agodon's recent poetry collection isDialogues with Rising Tides. Jeannine Hall Gailey says, "[Agodon's] interior world is lined with fragments of family tragedy while her outer world confounders her, the rising tides of environmental collapse, not a metaphor but a reality. Her oceanic views of the world teeter on the edge of a cocktail or a gunshot." Agodon's previous books include The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts for Your Writing Practice, and Hourglass Museum, a Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Julie Sun Poetry Prize honoring the best book of poems published by a small press. Agodon teaches at Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writing Workshop. She is cofounder of Two Sylvias Press as well as Co-Director of Poets on the Coast, a writing retreat for women. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, O, The Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and New England Review.