2023 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.

22 JANUARY 2023 — sunday

Joan Baranow and Tayve Neese

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Joan Baranow, A Slight Thing, Happiness, and Tayve Neese, evolution psalms, 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
Joan Baranow's new book is A Slight Thing, Happiness. Erin Rodoni says, "From the intricate intimacies of laparoscopic surgery to the strangely sensual seascape of a petri dish, Baranow's lush, incisive imagery reveals a scarred yet serene internal garden of organs and cells. From hospital beds to IVs and incubators, from the underdeveloped lungs of a preemie to the bruising love of early motherhood, these poems soothe and croon and bloom toward the messier, wilder garden that is the family and the world we live in." Baranow's previous books are Still You: Poems of Illness and Healing, In the Next Life, Living Apart, and Morning: Three Poems. Her poetry has appeared in the Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, Poetry East, JAMA, Feminist Studies, and other magazines. A fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and member of the Community of Writers, she has won individual artists fellowships in poetry from the Marin Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. She founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California.

Tayve Neese's new book is evolution psalms. Irena Mashinski says, "Tayve Neese's laconic, dynamic, rhythmically impeccable poems evolve with the determination of banyan tree roots, bound only by the mesmerizing pulse of metamorphosis—skeletal, igneous, stellar, emotional. Their tapestry is filled with scale-defying wonders—a horseshoe crab, a feather, or a molecule of salt—relying on each other for space to coil around, to fork through, to nest in; representing love itself in its incessant earthly movement." Her previous collections are Blood to Fruit and Hooved (audio chapbook). Locust is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her work has appeared in Fourteen Hills, The Paris Review (online edition), and Pedestal Magazine. Her poetry has been nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize with Black Lawrence Press. She has edited over twenty-five books, including poetry collections, novels, chapbooks, and memoirs, and is the Executive Editor and co-founder of Trio House Press. She is also the founder and primary editor of The Banyan Review.

5 FEBRUARY 2023 — sunday

Beverly Burch and Robert Thomas

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Beverly Burch, Leave Me a Little Want, and Robert Thomas, Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff, in person, 2727 California Street, between Ward and Stuart Streets, Berkeley, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Beverly Burch's new poetry book is Leave Me a Little Want. Julia Levine says, "I love this book and its urgent attention to language and form in the "treacherous province" of our current times. Burch never turns away from the coexistence of the beautiful and the bloody, the tedious and the risky, and so I not only trust her, but feel jolted awake." Beverly Burch's previous books are Latter Days of Eve, How a Mirage Works, and Sweet to Burn. Her poetry has appeared in 32 Poems, Gulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Review, Los Angeles Review, New England Review and other magazines. She also has two psychoanalytic books on women's sexual and gender relations, On Intimate Terms and Other Women.

Robert Thomas's new poetry collection is Sonnets with Two Torches and One Cliff. Kim Addonizio says, "A formally constrained poem that brilliantly manages to sound anything but. A paean to longing, to the mysteries of love and time and distance, 'Negligee and Hatchet,' as its title suggests, is full of contraries and surprises—swamp pop and Mick Jagger, grotto and tomb, Aphrodite and caramel corn…the poet's language turns and dazzles with every line." His previous books are Bridge, a novella, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction; Door to Door, selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize; and Dragging the Lake. His poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Atlantic, and other magazines. He also received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcart Prize.

19 FEBRUARY 2023 — sunday

David Alpaugh and Connie Post

Poetry Flash presents a reading from new books by David Alpaugh, Seeing The There There, and Connie Post, Between Twilight, 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, February 19 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.

Connie Post's new book can be purchased at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. David Alpaugh's new book is available at https://www.wordgalaxy.com/books/david-alpaugh-seeing-the-there-there-poems.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
David Alpaugh's new collection is Seeing The There There. Susan Terris says, "simply amazing," a "unique, one-of-a-kind book" "you will want to own…read…savor." Alpaugh fuses comic and serious poetry with more than one-hundred color photos, paintings and graphic images that include a beached whale, a three-legged cat, a martini with olives, a grief-stricken Jack-O-Lantern, John Donne's flea, Duchamp's famous bidet, and a ham sandwich. Each poem, Marvin R. Hiemstra writes "finds us in a sui generis universe" with "surprising rhymes surfing on fresh insight." Alpaugh's previous collection Spooky Action at a Distance was published by Word Galaxy in 2020. Counterpoint, 1994 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize-winner from Story Line Press, was reprinted in 2021. His work is included in the anthology California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Dana Gioia, and Alpaugh has been a finalist for Poet Laureate of California.

Connie Post's new poetry book is Between Twilight, from New York Quarterly Books. Diane Seuss says "This honest voice, this exiled voice, comes through in poems that strike me as prayer. They seek mercy, not so much from a deity but from the world, and most significantly, from herself." Connie Post delves deep into the difficult journeys of everyday life and intersects those with the difficult maps of the past. There are "atrocities in the body" and many ways a person can falter, fall or rise from "the hue of an unseen self." Post served as the first Poet Laureate of Livermore, California. Her previous full-length collections include Floodwater, Lyrebird Award-winner, and Prime Meridian, named a distinguished favorite in the Independent Book Awards. Her awards include the Crab Creek Review Poetry Award and Caesura Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Calyx, 2River, Cold Mountain Review, The American Journal of Poetry, River Styx, Slipstream, and Verse Daily.

26 FEBRUARY 2023 — sunday

Genny Lim, Maya Khosla, Chris Olander, John Curl

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Genny Lim Kra!, Maya Khosla All the Fires of Wind and Light, Chris Olander, River Light, John Curl, Rainbow Weather, 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 will be available at: bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. Genny Lim's recent collection is available at www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p1403/KRA!.html.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
These four dynamic poets were all featured readers at last fall's in-person Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in Berkeley, California.

Genny Lim's recent book is Kra!. Her previous collections are Paper Gods and Rebels, Child of War, and Winter Place, among others. Her work appears in The Politics of Life: Four Plays by Asian American Women, Unbroken Thread: Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women, Oxford Book of Women's Writings in the United States, and Island: Poetry and the History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island. Genny Lim is a recipient of the 1981 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and a Bay Guardian Goldie for Local Discovery 1991. She is currently the San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate (2017-present).

Maya Khosla's new collection is All the Fires of Wind and Light. Lucille Lang Days says, "Khosla presents climate change and endangered species with precise images and biological accuracy. Fire ecology, a widely misunderstood field, is a central theme. In this collection there is anticipation of catastrophe, but there is also hope: 'The living are awake / to the profusion soon to follow. / They will grow with the diligence / of all known colors / unfolding….'" Also a wildlife biologist and filmmaker, Maya Khosla's previous collections are Keel Bone, and Heart of the Tearing. Her work appears in the Chicago Quarterly Review, Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis, Munyori Literary Journal, and World Literature Today. She was Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2018–2020.

Chris Olander's poetry collection is River Light. Kirk Lumpkin says, "What has always impressed me about Chris Olander's poetry is how present, how kinetically alive the energies of Nature (birds, oaks, rivers, etc.) are in it and of how the words dance in the breath and sinew of it." Olander has published in many anthologies and magazines. He is a founding director of Poet's Playhouse in Nevada City (1988-89) and of the Nevada City Poetry Series of Grass Valley. He served as Poet Laureate of Nevada County, 2019-21. He leads the annual Strawberry Creek Walk for the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival.

John Curl's new poetry book is Rainbow Weather: Poems for Environmental Healing. Kim Shuck says, "The poems in Rainbow Weather challenge the reader to release expectation and received hierarchies and in exchange, to retrieve wonder. Current circumstances being what they are, the treatment for collective malaise is probably complicated, a combination of things with many moving parts, but somewhere in that combination there is certainly space for the calm, understanding observations in this poetry collection." His previous collections include Yoga Sutras of Fidel Castro, Revolutionary Alchemy, and Scorched Birth. His historical writings include Indigenous Peoples Day, and For All the People. He is co-editor of the recent anthology, Storm Warning: Poets for the Planet Building Socialism.

19 MARCH 2023 — sunday

Dean Rader and Meryl Natchez

Poetry Flash presents a reading and a conversation in poems by Meryl Natchez, Catwalk, and Dean Rader, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, in person, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Featured books for this event will be available at the event. Dean Rader's are also available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
"In this reading and conversation in poems, the poets will read poems that seem to speak to each other's work—from tales of the inimitable Frog and Toad children's books, the scenes from Reservoir Dogs, to the standard territory of love, sex, death and most everything else, except taxes."

Meryl Natchez's fourth book, Catwalk, received an Indie Best Book 2020 Award from Kirkus Reviews. Jericho Brown says, "Meryl Natchez casts the kind of spells that amount to a more precise definition for the "changing same" of what lyric poetry really is. Yes, these poems show a gift for formal dexterity with haibuns and cinquains and nonce verse, but what I love about them is how much of the world—how much of a life—Natchez conjures in the space of a few lines. From the biology of earthworms to the pitfalls of a forty-year love affair, there is no place this poetry won't touch." Meryl Natchez's work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, Literary Matters, The American Journal of Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. For more see www.merylnatchez.com.

Dean Rader's most recent poetry collection is Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and the Oklahoma Book Award. ZYZZYVA wrote of it, "By writing honestly about the difficulties of self-representation, Rader represents himself as a writer who cares deeply about his audience and his craft." His previous collection, Works & Days, won the T.S Eliot Prize. Eric Weinstein wrote of it, "his poems ask the difficult questions in accessible ways, ways rendered all the more effective via wry humor and an eye for the darkly poignant." Writer, scholar, and critic as well as a poet, Dean Rader also writes about Indigenous studies, modern and contemporary art, and visual culture. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

27 APRIL 2023 — thursday

Rose Black and Hannah Sward

Poetry Flash presents "An Evening of Poetry & Memoir," reading and discussion with poet Rose Black, Green Field, and memorist Hannah Sward, Strip, both writers work with Right to Write Press, a nonprofit that supports emerging writers who are incarcerated in California prisons; in-person, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Featured books for this event will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. Proceeds from the in-person book sales will benefit Poetry Flash, and a portion of the online proceeds will also support the series.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Hannah Sward's new book is Strip: A Memoir. She tells of being abandoned by her mother and living with her poet father on an island with no stores or cars. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee says, "Hannah Sward's memoir of how she blundered into the sex industry is touchingly honest, and written with a light touch." Booklist wrote, "Elegant prose, stripped of all sensationalism and demands for pity…a fresh, literary addition to the courageous and resonant addiction-memoir genre." Her writing has appeared in Halcoyne, Arts & Letters, Red Wheelbarrow, and Porter Gulch Review, among other magazines. She was Editor and Columnist at Third Street Villager Los Angeles, and has written for Fix and Your Tango. A longtime contributor at Erotic Review, she is also a Board member of Right to Write Press, a nonprofit that supports emerging writers who are incarcerated.

Rose Black's poetry books are Clearing, Winter Light, and Green Field. David St. John says, "Rose Black's superb new collection of poems, Green Field, is a sobering volume of recollections, reflections and meditations upon a life's ravaged hopes, the echoes of a personal past, and the raw realities of our present. Like fables and dreams gone dark in the lens, these poems instruct us in the complex measures we need to employ in determining what values still remain—and endure—in our lives." A Pushcart nominee, her poetry has been widely published, and her first two books are included in Yale's Beinecke Library for the Yale Collection of American Literature. She teaches poetry at Salinas Valley State Prison and is one of the founders of Right to Write Press, a nonprofit that promotes the growth of emerging poets who are incarcerated in California state prisons. She will read from her own work and from poetry by incarcerated writers, including Ubaldo Teque, Jr., who recently won first place in a statewide prison poetry contest with thousands of entries. She edited his chapbook, Niño Inmigrante. Rose Black lives and works at Renaissance Studios, an artists' collective in East Oakland.

11 MAY 2023 — thursday

Ann Fisher-Wirth and Dan Bellm

Poetry Flash presents An Evening of Poetry with poet and translator Dan Bellm, celebrating Counting, a chapbook, and his translation of Balam Rodrigo's Central American Book of the Dead, reading with Ann Fisher-Wirth, celebrating her new collection, Paradise is Jagged, in person, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this event will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash(a small portion of the online proceeds will support the series).

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Dan Bellm's new poetry book is Counting. Molly Fisk says, "Counting offers us Dan Bellm's deft conversational tone and his blending of the deep and the quotidian, with mesmerizing cadences that carry us further into ourselves and further into the wider world, both accountable and accounted for." His 2023 translation from the Spanish is Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo. Dan Bellm is the author of four previous books of poetry, One Hand on the Wheel, Buried Treasure, winner of the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America and the CSU Poetry Center Prize, Practice, 2009 California Book Award-winner, and Deep Well. His translations from Spanish and French include Speaking in Song, by Pura López Colomé, and The Song of the Dead, by Pierre Reverdy, supported by an Artist's Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught literary translation and poetry in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, Mills College, and New York University, and he serves as an interpreter for immigrants and asylum seekers with Centro Legal de la Raza, Oakland, California. Dan Bellm lives in Berkeley, California.

Ann Fisher-Wirth's new book of poems is Paradise is Jagged. Cyrus Cassells says of it "As a poet, Ann Fisher-Wirth is a steadfast wizard of telltale imagery and at-the-ready music…Fisher-Wirth's lyric concentration and attention to home, alive nature, and struggling humanity are that sacred and arrow-sure." She's authored six previous books of poems, including The Bones of Winter Birds and Mississippi, a poetry/photography collaboration with Maude Schuyler Clay. She also co-edited the acclaimed The Ecopoetry Anthology with Laura-Gray Street. Among her honors are two Fulbright awards and a 2023 Governor's Award for Excellence in Literature from the Mississippi Arts Commission. A senior fellow and board member of the Black Earth Institute, she recently retired from the University of Mississippi where she taught in the MFA program and directed the Environmental Studies program.

3 JUNE 2023 — saturday

Tribute to Al Young: Lee Herrick, Ishmael Reed, more

Poetry Flash and Something About the Blue Organizing Committee presents "Something About the Blues: A Tribute to Al Young, (1939-2021)," featured presenters include Ishmael Reed, California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick, RSVP required: info@poetryflash.org, in person, refreshments, Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley, free, 2:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

For this event, please RSVP by emailing info@poetryflash.org. RSVP is required.

MORE ABOUT THE TRIBUTE
Join us for "Something About the Blues: A Memorial Tribute to Al Young," to honor and remember Al Young, poet, and former Poet Laureate of California, a dynamic and generous presence in the California poetry landscape for decades. Since he passed away on April 17, 2021, we have not been able to safely gather to remember and celebrate his life. This event is a gathering of poets and friends to honor and remember his beautiful presence.

Featured readers and presenters will include Lee Herrrick, California Poet Laureate; Ishmael Reed; musicians Tuck & Patti; Michael Young, Al's son; Persis Karim; Kim Shuck, previous San Francisco Poet Laureate; Lisa Alvarez; Avotcja; Kim McMillon, and more.

11 JUNE 2023 — sunday

Mary Mackey and Judy Wells

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Mary Mackey, Creativity: Where Poems Begin, and Judy Wells, Night at the Musée d'Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities, in person, 2727 California Street, a Cooperative Art Gallery, Berkeley, free, 3:00 pm PDT (www.2727.today).

Featured books for this reading will be available at the event, and are also available at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Mary Mackey's new book is Creativity: Where Poems Begin. Mara Lynn Keller says, "In Creativity, Mary Mackey takes us on a journey to the mysterious place where creativity begins. Her quest makes this a book for anyone who wants to explore how ideas and bursts of insight come, not just to poets and novelists, but to us all." Mackey is the author of at least eight poetry books including The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems, 1974 to 2018, winner of 2019 Eric Hoffer Award for Best Book Published by a Small Press, Sugar Zone, winner of a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and Travelers With No Ticket Home. She is also the author of fourteen novels including The New York Times bestseller A Grand Passion, The Village of Bones: Sabalah's Tale, and Widow's War. Mackey is past president of PEN West, a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Professor Emerita of California State University, Sacramento. The Mary Mackey Papers are archived at Smith College, Massachusetts.
Judy Wells's new poetry book is Night at the Musée d'Orsay: Poems of Paris & Other Great European Cities. Kathleen Weaver says, "It's a treat to immerse yourself in Wells's poems in Night at the Musée d'Orsay, rich with life, color, and memory. She creates a wraparound mood of discovery, excitation, optimism, and the youthful joy of seeing for the first time those famous paintings, those foreign streets, a civilization freshly seen and intimately embraced." Judy Wells's previous books include Dear Phebe: The Dickinson Sisters Go West, I Dream of Circus Characters: A Berkeley Chronicle, and Everything Irish. Her writings have appeared in Berkeley Times, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, The Borzoi College Reader, Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, California Quarterly, Traveler's Tale Ireland, Value: Essays, Stories, & Poems by Women of a Certain Age, and Not Dead Yet: Feminism, Passion, and Women's Liberation. She is also co-editor of the anthology, Berkeley Literary Women's Revolution: Essays from Marsha's Salon.

event page

25 JUNE 2023 — sunday

Gail Rudd Entrekin and Elizabeth C. Herron

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Gail Rudd Entrekin, Walking Each Other Home, and Elizabeth C. Herron, In the Cities of Sleep, in person, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).


MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Gail Rudd Entrekin's new poetry book is Walking Each Other Home. Ellen Bass says, "At times spare and lyrical, at times rich with sensory detail, Entrekin invites readers into the intimacy of Walking Each Other Home." The publisher, Longship Press writes, "These poems sing the long and loving song shared by two people now facing a decline, and it is a song of love and devotion, a song of truth." Entrekin's previous books include Rearrangement of the Invisible, You Notice the Body, Change (will do you good), and The Art of Healing with Charles Entrekin. She co-edited Sierra Songs & Descant, an anthology of poetry and prose, and the poetry anthology Yuba Flows, and edits Canary, an online environmental literary magazine. Her poems have been widely published and were finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod International Journal. She lives in the hills of San Francisco's East Bay.

Elizabeth C. Herron's new book is In the Cities of Sleep. Greg Mahrer says, "In this haunting and passionate collection, Herron reminds us that we are 'out of season,' caught as we are in this fateful sweep of time where everything from the minute to the galactic speaks of our temporality." Herron's previous books are Insistent Grace, Desire Being Full of Distances, and The Stones, the Dark Earth. Her writing has appeared in Comstock Review, Canary, North American Review, West Marin Review, and elsewhere. She also writes articles about the importance of natural systems for the well-being of all life. A Fellow of the International League of Conservation Writers, her writing has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Foundation for Deep Ecology. Elizabeth Herron is the current Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, northern California.