April 5th | 7:30pm.
Book Release | Roan Press | "Visions of Joanna Newsom"

A poetry and prose reading from (and about) the new book from Roan Press, Visions of Joanna Newsom. Come and hear from authors Tim Kahl, Christian Kiefer, Rae Gouirand, and Brad Buchanan as well as artist Heather Jovanelli and book designer Joshua Lurie-Terrell. 

Sometimes mentioned as one of the most prominent members of the psychedelic folk movement, Joanna Newsom is a harpist and songwriter from Nevada City. Her music incorporates elements from Appalachian folk music and avant-garde modernism. She has recorded the following CDs: The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City, 2004); Ys (Drag City, 2006); Have One On Me (Drag City, 2010)[33]. She is the second cousin, twice removed, of San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom.

Copies of the book will be available for sale.

Here are some nice words about the book.

"This fascinating, enlightening, and fun book is a study of an artist who has made two masterpieces and been a success both commercially and with unspeakable music snobs. Joanna Newsom's work will continue to be a must-hear for decades. If for no other reason, get this book because it will be worth a lot of money on eBay one day."

- Hal Willner, legendary music producer and music supervisor of Saturday Night Live

"The exquisite songwriting and ethereal singing of the superb Joanna Newsom are the occasion of this fascinating, celebratory collection of wise essays, astute reflections, and poetic reckonings with this unique artist's work. This is a book for long-time devotees and new initiates both. Buy this book today."

- David St. John, professor of creative writing at University of Southern California and author of The Face: A Novella in Verse

"Serious without being eggheady, playful without being frivolous, Visions of Joanna Newsom is a passionate investigation into one of America's most unique living musical forces. In its determination to rescue Newsom from the lost island of 'quirk,' this sharp, frequently witty collection digs deep into the too-often unspoken question that drives fans and non-fans alike: What is beautiful?."

- Katrina Onstad, columnist for Chatelaine Magazine and author of How Happy To Be

- - -

March 29th | 7:30pm.
A Benefit Reading for Autism | Rebecca Foust, Julie Bruck, Geoffrey Neill
Host: Frank Graham

Rebecca Foust was born in Altoona, formerly one of the country’s great railroad towns, located in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Hollidaysburg, a tiny town surrounded by farmlands and forests, quarries and strip mines. After attending Smith College and Stanford Law School on scholarships, she practiced law in San Francisco for ten years, then worked as an advocate and grassroots political organizer for parents of kids with autism and other learning disorders.

She continues to do volunteer work for causes related to autism and teach and write in northern California, where I live with my husband and three teenagers. In January of 2010 I will receive my MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her recent poetry is published or forthcoming in small print journals including Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, The Hudson Review, and Women’s Review of Books, earning awards including two Pushcart nominations in 2008. Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes, and her full length book, All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award and will be released in 2010.  Also to be released in 2010, by Tebot Bach Press, is God, Seed, a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens.

Julie Bruck has taught at several Canadian universities, and was a resident faculty member at The Robert Frost Place. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson, fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and the Canada Council, and has published two collections, The Woman Downstairs (1993) and The End of Travel (1999). A third book is in the works. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Ms. New poems are forthcoming in The New Yorker and The Malahat Review. A Montreal native, she has lived in San Francisco for eleven years.

Geoffrey Neill is one of the alternating hosts at Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Café in Sacramento. He has lived in California his whole life (thirty-one complete years, one partial year), currently on 2nd Ave in Sacramento. He has a daughter (Muriel, and the pinnacle of evolution) who is nearly two years old, and he recently started publishing chapbooks of local poets under the name /little m press/.

- - -

March 22nd | 7:30pm.
Kel Munger, Robert M. Stanley
Host: Bob Stanley

Kel Munger edits the poetry, books and theater sections, among her many other duties at the Sacramento News & Review. She was a Pearl M. Hogrefe Fellow at Iowa State University and is the author of The Fragile Peace You Keep: Poems (New Rivers Press, 1998). Her poetry has been published in a number of journals, including Iowa Woman, Sinister Wisdom, The Lesbian Review of Books, The Apalachee Quarterly and Rattle: Poems for the 21st Century. She's recently begun writing fiction, and her story, "Missus Finn" recently won the Mighty River Short Story Contest at Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley. The novel from which that story was taken is currently under consideration at Southeast Missouri University Press.

Robert Stanley wrote his first poem (for a family Christmas card) while serving in the Army occupation forces in Seoul, South Korea right after World War II.  After discharge from the Army in 1946, Robert studied poetry at Pasadena City College, and at UCLA where he received a degree in English literature.  The poets of the Tang Dynasty (in translation) have long been his main inspiration and models.  Their Taoist-Buddhist world view of these poets - along with teachings of modern science - inform the poetry Stanley has been writing, especially since the late 1980s.  His poems have been published, first in a national college-poetry anthology (1947), and in several newspapers, and religious magazines.

- - -

March 14th | 3 - 5 p.m.
California Poets in the Schools | Poetry from the 45th anniversary anthology
at the Sacramento Poetry Center

The year Bruce Springsteen released "Born to Run," color TV began transmitting in Australia, "Saturday Night Live" debuted, and the Vietnam War ended, a group of San Francisco poets who believed in children's creativity started California Poets in the Schools (CPITS).

California Poets in the Schools is still going strong.

Please join 20 CPITS poets and a Poetry Out Loud 2010 winner for an afternoon of innovative poetry from the 45th anniversary anthology, What the World Hears.

Dozens of poets from across the state will gather at the Sacramento Poetry Center for a celebration of the 45th anniversary of California Poets in the Schools (CPITS). Please join us! Sacramento's Poet Laureate Bob Stanley will be in there and it's a great opportunity to learn about poetry happening in town and throughout California among people of all ages.

Free! All ages welcome.

- - -

Monday, March 8th | 7:30pm
Heidy Steidlmayer, Jim Powell
Hosted by Emmanuel Sigauke

Heidy Steidlmayer is a graduate of Northwestern University and of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. In 2007, she was a recipient of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and in 2009 she was awarded a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Literary Imagination and Calyx, among others. Her work is also included in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology, Second Edition, by Helen Vendler. Of Steidlmayer’s work, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote to The Sacramento Bee newspaper in September 2009: “She is a remarkable poet (who) writes poems of great compactness and density, as technically accomplished as they are emotionally devastating. This is an age of irony and sprawl, and she’s going – bravely and with great success – her own way. People may not know much about her work now, but they will soon.” Here’s a link to her poem in Poetry (Feb 2008).

Jim Powell is the author of two collections of poetry, Substrate, just published by Pantheon Books, and It Was Fever That Made The World (University of Chicago Press), and the translator of The Poetry Of Sappho (Oxford University Press) and Catullan Revenants (Booklyn).  His poems and translations are included in the Paris Review Anthology, the Norton Introduction to Literature, the Oxford Anthology of Classical Verse In English Translation, California Poetry, From the Gold Rush To the Present, and the Addison Street Anthology. His honors include the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines Younger Poets Prize, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Translation Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship.  He held the Sherry Poet lectureship at the University of Chicago in Fall 2005.  He is a native and resident of Northern California. SFGate.com says “There's elegance in his language, reverence for the California landscape and outrage at the plunder and greed of the settlers who appropriated this land in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.” You can read the full article on Powell here.

- - -

Monday, March 1st | 7:30pm
Poets from the Poems-For-All Series
Hosted by Bob Stanley

Featured poets include:
Manny Gale
Frank Graham
Rachel Hansen
Ru Hansen
Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Rebecca Morrison
Geoffrey Neill
Danny Romero
Rivkah Sass
Abe Sass
Bob Stanley
Mary Zeppa

Poems-For-All (PFA) are miniature books of poetry that are given away for free. There are over 1,000 different books in the series from hundreds of poets from all around the world. This reading celebrates the Sacramento poets who've given not only their poems but their encouragement and support to PFA (which is based out of a small used bookstore in Midtown Sacramento.) This evening we'll celebrate not the series, not the books, but what Poems-For-All has always been about: the poets.

What is to be read
Poets will read short poems from their miniature books published as part part of the Poems-For-All Project as well as poems from others who are in the series, including William Blake, Kenneth Patchen, d.a. levy, William Wantling, Emily Dickinson, Roque Dalton, Jack Spicer, Jack Micheline, Ted Joans, Dr. Suess and others.

A note on length
This is not a marathon reading. Even though there are a lot of readers, the poems are short and the program is designed to move quickly. We hope you'll enjoy the variety of poems and poets presented -- if anything, the PFA series is diverse -- but we'll have you home at a respectable hour.

Poems-For-All
They're scattered around town -- on buses, trains, cabs, in restrooms, bars, left along with the tip; stuffed into a stranger's back pocket. Whatever. Wherever. Small poems in small booklets half the size of a business card. A project of the 24th street irregular press, which cranks them out to be taken by the handful and scattered like seeds by those who want to see poetry grow in a barren cultural landscape.

Monday, February 22 | 7:30pm
Maiana Minahal and Danielle Montgomery
Hosted byTim Kahl

- - -

Friday, February 19  |  7:00 to 8:30pm
A MARATHON OF LOVE POEMS
Twenty local poets read poems of love, lust, and heartache Refreshments provided.
Hosted by Cynthia Linville

- - -

Thursday, February 18  | Noon  
Brown Bag Poetry Reading at Central Library
Bring your own favorite poems-
hosted by Mary Zeppa and Lawrence Dinkins
Note: reading at 828 I Street

- - -

Monday, February 15
7:30 PM
Anna Marie, Laura Cooks (Immobeme), Sean King and Dawn DiBartolo
Hosted by Lawrence Dinkins [NSAA] and Emmanuel Sigauke

Anna Marie A spoken word artist in the business of exporting verbal remedies. Feel the rythm of my speech, do not read my lips! See her Facebook bio

Laura Cooks (Immobeme)
See her Facebook bio

Sean King
See his Facebook bio

Dawn DiBartolo
See her Facebook bio

- - -

Monday, February 8
6:00 [Workshop] 7:30 PM [Reading]
Nepalese poet Yuyutsu RD Sharma
Hosted by Rebecca Morrison

Yuyutsu RD Sharma (Ram Dass) A widely traveled major Nepali/Indian writer was born at Nakodar, Punjab and grew up in Nakodar and later at Nangal Township of Shivalik ranges of Mahabharata Hills where his father, Madan Lal, worked. Yuyutsu grew up in a very religious atmosphere with his mother, Shanti Devi and at the age of nine became a shaman as he was thought to be possessed by a serpent spirit, his family deity.

Later he came under the impression of Naga ascetics whom his father revered. But after finishing his Bachelor's degree in KRM DAV College in Nakodar, Yuyutsu went to Baring Union Christian College, Batala and received his Master's Degree in English Literature. Later he received his M Phil at the University of Rajasthan where he met American poet David Ray. Yuyutsu remained active in the literary circles of Rajasthan and acted in plays by Shakespeare, Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee.

He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from The Rockefeller Foundation, Ireland Literature Exchange, Trubar Foundation, Slovenia, The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and The Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature, Yuyutsu RD Sharma is a distinguished poet and translator.

He has published eight poetry collections, including Space Cake, Amsterdam, & Other Poems from Europe and America, (Howling Dog Press, Colorado, 2009), Annapurna Poems, (Nirala, New Delhi 2008), Everest Failures (White Lotus Book Shop, Kathmandu, 2008); A Photographic and Poetic Journey to the Foot of Everest, (Epsilonmedia, Germany, 2006) with German photographer Andreas Stimm and a translation of Irish poet Cathal O’ Searcaigh. He has translated and edited several anthologies of contemporary Nepali poetry in English and launched a literary movement, Kathyakayakalp (Content Metamorphosis) along with Shailendra Sakar in Nepali poetry.

A collection of his poems in Slovenian translation, entitled, Jezero Fewa in Konj came out from the Sodobnost International Press, Ljubljana. A collection of his poems in French, entitled, Poemes de l’ Himalayas has just appeared from Harmattan, Paris.

Yuyutsu’s own work has been translated into German, French, Italian, Slovenian, Hebrew, Spanish and Dutch. Currently, he edits Pratik, A Magazine of Contemporary Writing and contributes literary columns to Nepal’s leading daily, The Himalayan Times and The Kathmandu Post.

- - -

Wednesday, February 3 |   6pm | Poetry reading
Early evening poetry at the Sacramento Room
featuring poets from the Sacramento Anthology
Hosted by Bob Stanley
Note: reading at 828 I Street

- - -

Monday, February 1 |  7:30pm | Poetry reading
Lori Ostlund and Robin Ekiss
Hosted by Dorine Jennette

- - -

Friday, January 29  |  A night of fiction
Stories on Stage – featuring Jodi Angel
Hosted by Valerie Fioravanti

- - -

Katie Cappello and Pam Richmond
Monday, Jan. 25, 2010

A native of Phoenix, Arizona, Katie Cappello currently resides in Walnut Grove, a small farming town in the Sacramento Delta, where she works as a freelance writer, composing book reviews for The Sacramento Book Review, California Literary Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Her poems can be found in journals such as Burnside Review, Cave Wall, Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, Los Angeles Review, and RUNES: A Review of Poetry. Katie is the author of the full-length collection, Perpetual Care (2009), and the chapbook A Classic Game of Murder, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.

Pam Richmond teaches at Sacramento City College, and she has published poems and fiction is several small magazines. She also is the theater and music reporter for The Gold Country Times.

 

Saturday, January 23 | 7 to 9pm
The Writer’s Brush art show and reading

Thursday, January 21 | Noon | Poetry reading
Brown Bag Poetry Reading at Central Library
Bring your own favorite poems-
Hosted by Mary Zeppa and Lawrence Dinkins
Note: reading at 828 I Street

Monday, January 18  |   7:30pm | Poetry reading
Keith Ratzlaff and Jeff Knorr
Hosted by Tim Kahl

 

James DenBoer and Cynthia Broshi
Monday, Jan. 11, 2010
Host: Emmanuel Sigauke

James DenBoer has a new book of translations out by the sixth century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus Small Gifts, Great Grace: The Personal Poems of Venantius Fortunatus (Bald Trickster Press, 2009). He is also the author of Learning The Way and Trying to Come Apart (University of Pittsburgh Press), Nine Poems; Olson/DenBoer: A Letter; and Lost in Blue Canyon (Christopher's Books), Dreaming of the Chinese Army (Blue Thunder Press), A Bibliography of the Published Work of Douglas Blazek 1961 – 2001 (Glass Eye Books), Back Until Then (PalOMine Press), Black Dog: An Unfinished Segue Between Two Seasons, (Rattlesnake Press) and Stonework: Selected Poems (Swan Scythe Press, 2007). He has had grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, and PEN Center-New York, among others. He is presently translating the Romance kharjas of Hebrew and Arabic muwashshahat.

Cynthia Broshi is a registered practitioner of Jin Shin Jyutsu, the ancient art of harmonizing body, mind and spirit with gentle touch. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area but she gives seminars and demonstrations all over the world on the practice of Jin Shin Jyutsu. She also teaches self-help classes in the Bay Area from the Mary Burmeister self-help books. She has recently published work in The Portland Review.

Saturday, January 9  | 6 to 9pm | Art Show
A Second Saturday Reception for Jennifer Pickering, JoAnn Anglin, and other artists.

 

Bill Gainer, JoAnn Anglin, Jim DenBoer, Arthur Butler, Roberta Alexander, Judy Brim, Katrina Hays
Monday, Jan. 4, 2010
Host: Bob Stanley

Kick off a new year of poetry at SPC with seven poets – winners from The Sacramento Bee’s poetry contest.

Bill Gainer is known for the openness of his confessional poetry and is recognized as one of the founding contributors to the modern movement of "After Hours Poetry." He has contributed to the literary scene as a writer, editor, promoter, publicist and poet. Gainer considers himself forever influenced by an odd mix of outsiders. Gainer is nationally published and remains a sought after reader.

JoAnn Anglin is formerly a poet-teacher in the schools, she is a long-time member of the Escritores del Nuevo Sol (Writers of the New Sun). Besides the Escritores’ anthology, her poems have been in 100 Poems about Sacramento, Anthology of the Third Sunday Poets, The Pagan Muse, and the Rattlesnake Review. She co-hosts the PoemSpirits series and writes on the arts. Her chapbook, Words Like Knives, Like Feathers, was published by Rattlesnake Press in 2004.

James DenBoer lives in Sacramento, California, and works lightly as a rare book scout. His writing has won grants and awards from the International Poetry Forum, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Council on the Arts, the Carnegie Fund for Authors, the Authors League, PEN/New York, and other institutions. He has also translated into English, for the first time, a book of poems by Venantius Fortunatus, a 6th century Latin poet, and the extant 11–13th century Romance kharjas of Arabic and Hebrew muwashshah. DenBoer is working on a new poetry manuscript for publication in June 2008. Recently James has published the collection the poems by Venantius Fortunatus on Bald Trickster Press.

Arthur Butler is a self-proclaimed poet, performance artist, and musician and says ‘Minstrel’ is the word that describes him best.

Katrina Hays is a second-year MFA student with the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is the editor of Soundings, the RWW newsletter. She lives in Bend, Oregon.

 

Monday, Dec. 28 | No reading
Monday, Dec. 21 | No reading

 

Squaw Valley Review Reading
with Joe Atkins, L.A. Jones, Lawrence Kaplun, Theresa McCourt and Wendy Trevino
Monday, Dec. 14 at 7:30 PM
HQ for the Arts at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley

Joe Atkins, an alumni of CSUS & UCD, lives in Sacramento. Currently he is a freelance writer and homeowner. He enjoys Facebook, Twitter, blogs, hulu, netflix, movies, bookstores, MP3s, concerts, drinking, poker, his spouse, his cat, and google/excel spreadsheets. 

Lisa Jones (L. A. Jones) co-edited The Squaw Valley Review 2008 and is the Interview Editor for Poetry Now.  Her work has won local prizes, is forthcoming in Tule Review, and published in Tea Party, Convergence (on-line), Poetry Now, and Qarrtsiluni's Journaling the Apocaplypse (on-line and print anthology). She has a Ph.D. in sociology, but is most proud of her studies with Camille Norton, Kim Addonizio, Susan Kelly-Dewitt, and the great staff at Squaw Valley and the Napa Valley Writer's Conference.  

Lawrence Kaplun co-edited the Squaw Valley Review 2008.  He was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in San Francisco, where he works for the California Academy of Sciences. His poems have appeared online in Limp Wrist Magazine.

Theresa McCourt won an Albert and Elaine Borchard Fellowship in poetry in October 2008, and in November 2008, graduated from the Artist Residency Institute through the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. Her credits include a 1st place in the 2007 Maggi H. Meyer Memorial Contest, and publications include Peter Parasol, mamazine.com, Poetry Now, Rattlesnake Review, and Toyon.

Wendy Trevino lives and writes in San Francisco. Her work has previously appeared in Makeout Creek and Faultline and is forthcoming in the super-fun journal West Wind Review.

 

Zoe Keithley
Mon. Dec. 7, 2009 at 7:30 PM
HQ for the Arts at 1719 25th Street

A Roan Press Presents reading of Crow Song
with a special “post-natal” appearance by Roan press publisher Brad Buchanan

Zoe Keithley's stories have appeared in the North American Review, American Fiction, F3, Emergence, Pigeon, Dogwood and other journals. Her fiction has won a fellowship in Prose from the Illinois Arts Council and finalist awards from Zoetrope, American Fiction, Dogwood, Emergence and Hyphen. A novel and short story collection are circulating. She lives in Sacramento and is at work on a second novel, teaches private writing students locally and at a distance, and is learning to play and compose music on the banjo.

Some praise for Crow Song:

"Gentle yet fiercely sculpted poems... Hers is not a well-known voice, but one that exudes experience as well as unapologetic passion."
— C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic Monthly
"Keithley's poetic task is to redeem the family and the lost places of childhood, and, in this book's final poems, to redefine spiritual longing as love."
— Dennis Schmitz, former Sacramento Poet Laureate.

 

Wed. Dec. 2, 2009 at 6 PM

 

Lucy Lang Day, Tom Miner and Diana Henning
Mon. Nov. 30, 2009 at 7:30 PM
HQ for the Arts at 1719 25th Street
Host: Frank Graham

Lucy Lang Day’s poetry collections are The Curvature of Blue (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), God of the Jellyfish (Cervena Barva Press, 2007), The Book of Answers (Finishing Line Press, 2006), Infinities (Cedar Hill Publications, 2002), Greatest Hits, 1975-2000(Pudding House Publications, 2001), Wild One(Scarlet Tanager Books, 2000), Fire in the Garden (Mother's Hen, 1997) and Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (Berkeley Poets' Workshop and Press, 1982), which was selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She is a co-author of How to Encourage Girls in Math and Science: Strategies for Parents and Educators (Dale Seymour), and the author of the libretto for Eighteen Months to Earth, a science fiction opera with music by John Niec. Her first children's book, Chain Letter, was published by Heyday Books in 2005. She received her M.A. in English and M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and her M.A. in zoology and Ph.D. in science and mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books, she is also director of the Hall of Health, a museum in Berkeley.

Tom Miner has two daughters, Sara and Mieke. He and his wife, Elisabeth, are avid hikers and travelers. Each summer he climbs a 14,000-foot peak and adds to the 70 countries he’s visited. In the 1980’s he published the poetry quarterly, Pinchpenny, and now teaches writing at Sacramento City College.

Dianna Henning’s poetry books include The Tenderness House, published by Poets Corner Press in Stockton, CA and a book from Black Buzzard Press entitled The Broken Bone Tongue. She shared a chapbook with poet Ioanna Veronika Warwick entitled "Settling Accounts" published by the Contemporary Review. Her work has appeared in Crazyhorse, The Lullwater Review, Poetry International, Fugue, The Asheville Poetry Review, South Dakota Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review and the Seattle Review. She taught for California Poets in the Schools, through the William James Association’s Prison Arts Program and through several California Arts Council grants, as well as through a recent California Humanities grant.

Admission is free! Refreshments and open-mic included, at the Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street. Call for information:  (916) 979-9706.

Come see Frank’s photograph exhibit currently at the Pop-Up Gallery at 1719 25th Street

 

Monday, Nov. 23 at 7:30 PM
Lee Herrick, Michael Medrano
1719 25th Street

Lee Herrick is the author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007). He was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted at ten months.  His poems have been published in ZYZZYVA, Berkeley Poetry Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, MiPoesias, and The Bloomsbury Review, among others, and in anthologies such as Seeds from a Silent Tree: An Anthology of Korean Adoptees, Hurricane Blues: Poems About Katrina and Rita, and Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd Edition. He has also recently served as Guest Editor for the Rio Grande Review, the literary magazine of the Bilingual MFA Program the University of Texas, El Paso, and for Asian American Poetry and Writing, based in Los Angeles. He is the founding editor of In the Grove and teaches at Fresno City College.

Michael Luis Medrano was born and raised in Fresno, California, the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and  has performed his work at Stanford University, The Loft Literary Arts Center in Minneapolis, and the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in North American Review, Bombay Gin, and The Cortland Review among others. His debut collection of poetry Born in the Cavity of Sunsets will be published in September 2009 by Bilingual Review Press. Once again based in Fresno, Medrano is teaching, hosting a literary radio show, and working on completing a second collection of poems.

Admission is free! Refreshments and open-mic included, at the Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street. Call for information:  (916) 979-9706.

Monday, Nov. 16 at 7:30 PM
Bill Gainer, R.D. Armstrong
1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley

Bill Gainer is known for the openness of his confessional poetry and is recognized as one of the founding contributors to the modern movement of "After Hours Poetry." He has contributed to the literary scene as a writer, editor, promoter, publicist, publisher and poet. Gainer considers himself forever influenced by an odd mix of outsiders. He says, early on he was swept away by the clarity, boldness, courage and brevity of the works of Richard Brautigan and Michael McClure. Later he found himself enthralled with the storytelling talents of the likes of Tom Waits, William Kennedy, Johnny Cash, Freddy Fender and a legion of “Meat Poets." Gainer has a long standing love of the short poem, but is often more recognized for his longer pieces. He continues to read and work with a wide range of poets and writers, including readings on KUSF radio with Punk-Rocker Patti Smith and performances with California Poet Laureate, Al Young.  Gainer can be previewed at billgainer.com . 

R.D. Armstrong, aka: Raindog, has published 14 chapbooks and four full length collections of poetry, his most recent Fire and Rain Selected Poems, volumes #1 and #2. His poems are widely published and he is a sought after performer on the Southern California poetry scene. With a laugh, Armstrong says of his poems, "No kids, no wife, no house, no new car - I am not exactly living the American dream. That is kind of what I write about."  He is also the editor and publisher of Lummox Press, which produces the online Lummox Journal, the Little Red Book Series (currently at 59 titles) and several stand-alone titles, including: LAST CALL: the Legacy of Charles Bukowski and the recently released anthology, Down this Crooked Road.  Check out www.lummoxpress.com.

Admission is free! Refreshments and open-mic included, at the Sacramento Poetry Center, 1719 25th Street. Call for information:  (916) 979-9706.

 

Monday, Nov. 9 at 7:30 PM
Jodi Angel, Valerie Fioravanti, Joey Garcia, Paul Mann and Lynka Adams
HQ for the Arts at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley

The Farallon Review will host a creative prose reading at the Sacramento Poetry Center. Monday, November 9, gathering at 7:00, reading 7:30 to 8:30.  
Free admission, with copies of the new issue of The Farallon Review for sale!

http://www.farallonreview.com

Jodi Angel’s first collection of short stories, The History of Vegas, was published in 2005 by Chronicle Books. The collection was named as a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005 as well as a LA Times Book Review Discovery. Her short story “Portions” was selected for Special Mention for the 2007 Pushcart Prize and has also been adapted into an independent short film. Her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Sycamore Review, and Carve Magazine, among other publications. She currently teaches literature and fiction writing at UC Davis and Sacramento City College. 

Valerie Fioravanti writes fiction, essays, and prose poems. Her story collection, The Brooklyn Shuffle, was recently a finalist for the Tartt First Book Award. Her stories have appeared in North American Review, Cimarron Review, Hunger Mountain, and Green Mountains Review, among others. My stories and prose poems have earned four Pushcart Prize nominations, and special mention in Pushcart Prize XXVIII. I received a Fulbright Fellowship (Italy) to research my novel, Bel Casino, which is one of two novels currently in the works.

Joey Garcia is a certified spiritual direction counselor, but is most widely known for her weekly advice column, “Ask Joey,” which has been firmly entrenched within the pages of the Sacramento News & Review.

Paul Mann is a defense investigator for inmates on California’s death row.

Lynka Adams (aka “Moontrout”) is a writer, sometime antiquarian book dealer, daughter, wife and mother, seeker of Essential Beauty and the spirits in the night from which all creativity springs. She was born in the year of the snake.

Mon. Nov. 2, 2009 at 7:30 PM
Richard Spilman
SPC Book Manuscript Winner for 2009
[Judge: Dennis Schmitz]
1719 25th Street at HQ for the Arts

Richard Spilman was born and raised in Normal, IL and holds a BA from Illinois Wesleyan, an MA from San Francisco State and a PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton.  His collection of short stories, Hot Fudge, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1990, of which Joseph Heller said, "An outstanding talent of remarkable versatility.... Richard Spilman writes with telling imagination about men and women, about the young and the elderly, about people who know and people who do not. In Hot Fudge he has given us a book that is humorous, ironic, and perceptive, a work of honesty and integrity that is always deeply moving." R.V. Cassill praised the book's "Uncommon precision and elegance." Carolyn Chute said, "Richard Spilman is a writer who makes so many varied characters his own, who makes them turbulent, disconcerting, and yet universal and plain, that he has mastered not just his fictional world, but he has mastered us, his readers." He has published poetry in over thirty journals, most recently in New Letters, Oxford Magazine, The Southern Review, and DoubleTake.

Monday, October 26 at 7:30 PM
30th Anniversary Event for the Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th Street at HQ for the Arts

The Sacramento Poetry Center  - Sacramento's center for the literary arts since 1979, marks its anniversary with the release of Keepers of the Flame: The First 30 Years.  Keepers, published by Rattlesnake Press, was collected and edited by Mary Zeppa, Kate Asche, and Emmanuel Sigauke.  

“Our goal is to give the reader a series of glimpses into the first 30 years of the Sacramento Poetry Center.  Think of it as the in-print version of a highlight reel, brought to on-paper life by the remarkable generosity and amazing tech savvy of Photographer Charlie McComish and Graphic Designer Richard Hansen.”

It’s going to be a festive night, a relaxed and celebratory gathering, light on formal presentation.  The Editors plan to talk a little about SPC’s history and about the project.  Contributors to Keepers (which includes an interview with Theresa Vinciguerra and brief essays by Julia Connor, MerryLee Croslin, Victoria Dalkey, Patrick Grizzell, Heather Hutcheson, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Bob Stanley and Stan Zumbiel) Publisher Kathy Kieth, Graphic Designer Hansen and Photographer McComish have also been invited to join in the discussion.

Libations and light refreshments will be provided.  And, in the spirit of the occasion, the walls of SPC will display a sampling of photos, posters and “artifacts” from the Center’s first 30 years.

By a delightful piece of serendipity, the celebration will take place on (by then Mayor Anne Rudin’s proclamation) Sacramento Poetry Day.  Please join us for the October 26 festivities at SPC, 1719 25th Street (in the California Stage complex at 25th and R)  7:30 - 10:00pm.

 

Mon. Oct. 12, 2009
Frank Andrick with Christopher Fairman,
Josh Fernandez and David Houston and Strings
a presentation of Poetry, Prose, Story Telling, Song, Music, Pre-recorded Sounds and Noise, Silent and not-so-silent films, cine-poems
At 7:30 PM
Host: Bob Stanley
refreshments and a poetic meet and greet at 7:30
Free. Donations Accepted.

1) The show starts at 8:00PM sharp with a short film plus poem and songs by Chris Fairman.

2) Segue into a set by Frank Andrick reading/performing poems interpolated with films by Man Ray, Stan Brakhage, etc. with an additional few poems with Wendy Rivera on theremin and Frank Andrick on vox.

3) Then the stage is set for David Houston and Strings. The wonderful wordwork and imagery and voice of David Houston set to "Strings" (his working string section.)

We hope to bring you something new in all of this. We hope you can make it a point to join us for all the FUN on this evening.

p.s. josh has written a new story for the evening, and frank has a few new things too. WHO KNOWS what might happen and what you might hear, see, and ... ????????????

 

Ruebi Freyja and Phillip T. Nails
Monday, Sept. 21 at 6:00 PM
At Fremont Park (15th and P)
Host: Rebecca Morrison

Ruebi Freyja has been writing and reading poetry for twelve years. She is a full time student of anthropology and a folksinger. She lives in San Francisco.

Phillip T. Nails was born out of passion here in California. P.T. discovered poetry in Sacramento where he grew up studying theatre. Since '98 he has been living in San Francisco where his love of poetry, theatre and dance has continued to grow. Now, with his lover and partner Elisabeth, he will be touring America with a poetry and theatre trunk show. Look for them in a town near you!

September 14-17, 2009
Confluence of Poets 2009
James BlueWolf, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Maya Khosla,
Indigo Moor and Dennis Hock
Readings hosted by Bob Stanley and Tim Kahl

Sacramento Poetry Center presents the
2009 Confluence of Poets
Five acclaimed California poets read at six colleges Sept 14-17.
All events are free to the public.

Schedule of Events

Monday September 14
12:00 noon Reading at Folsom Lake College Room FL1-008
Maya Khosla and Susan Kelly-DeWitt

7:30 pm Reading at Sacramento Poetry Center - 1719 25th Street, Sacramento
James BlueWolf, Maya Khosla, Dennis Hock,
Susan Kelly-DeWitt and Indigo Moor

Tuesday September 15
12:15 pm Reading at American River College
Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Maya Khosla, Indigo Moor

12 noon Reading at Sacramento City College
James BlueWolf and Dennis Hock

Wednesday September 16
12 noon Reading at California State University, Sacramento
Maya Khosla, Indigo Moor

11 am Reading at Solano College, Fairfield
James BlueWolf, Dennis Hock

Thursday September 17
12 noon Reading at Cosumnes River College
Maya Khosla, Indigo Moor

for specific room locations, or updates on these readings, go to www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org, or call 916-240-1897

The poets

James BlueWolf has been a songwriter/recording artist, poet, author, lecturer and storyteller since the early 1970s. An internationally published poet, Mr. BlueWolf’s stories, essays and radio productions have been featured across the U.S. and Canada. Mr. BlueWolf was awarded the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers & Storytellers’ Children’s Writer of the Year Award (2006-2007) for his book Speaking for Fire.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press) and five previous chapbooks, including A Camellia for Judy (Frith Press, 1998), Feather’s Hand (Swan Scythe Press, 2000), To a Small Moth (Poet’s Corner Press, 2001), The Land (Rattlesnake Press, 2005) and a letterpress collection, The Book of Insects (Spruce Street Press, 2003).

Dennis Hock teaches creative writing at Cosumnes River College. Instrumental in developing the Sutterwriters program in 2003, he continues to work in hospitals and retreat centers with groups that use expressive writing as a healing process. An accomplished poet, Dennis is the author of The Secret Cup: Poems of Grief and Healing.

Maya Khosla is an Indian poet living in California. Her latest book Keel Bone is the winner of the 2003 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. Maya is also the author of Web of Water, a creative non-fiction manuscript, and Heart of the Tearing, a chapbook collection of poetry. Her poetry has also featured in America's Review, Permafrost, Poetry Flash, and Seneca Review. Ms. Khosla performs at the annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival in Berkeley.

Indigo Moor’s Tap-Root was published in 2006 as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. His second book Through the Stonecutter’s Window is scheduled for April 2009 release by Northwestern University Press as winner of their Second Book Prize. He is a 2003 recipient of Cave Canem’s Writing fellowship in poetry, former vice president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, andeditor for the Tule Review. He is the winner of the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest winner.

Confluence of Poets:
This series of readings, workshops, and class visits grew out of a meeting of Sacramento-area poets and poetry teachers in the fall of 2008. Thanks to a grant that SPC received late that year, this event has become a reality. We are honored to be able to bring this talented and diverse quintet of writers to six area colleges.

The Sacramento Poetry Center was established in 1979 to promote the art of poetry in the Sacramento region. With over 200 members, weekly readings and workshops, and a dedicated volunteer board, SPC is thriving as it enters its fourth decade of service to the literary community. If you want to attend a reading, lend a hand, donate, or just browse, check the Poetry Center website at www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org

Special thanks to The Borchard Foundation,The Wells Fargo Foundation, Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission, Poets and Writers Magazine, SPC Board of Directors, Michael Wyly and Jack Schouten, Solano Community College, Jeff Knorr and Albert Garcia, Sacramento City College, Joshua McKinney, California State University Sacramento, Lisa Sapra, Folsom Lake College, Heather Hutcheson and Emmanuel Sigauke, Cosumnes River College, John Hess and Michael Spurgeon, American River College.

 

Saturday, September 12
Poetry Kapihan (Poetry Over Coffee)
2:30PM to 4:30PM

The SPC AND THE SFTPAA
invite you to hear remarkable poetry from
the Sinag-tala library and from friends.

In celebration of the 20th Anniversary of the
SINAG-TALA THEATRICAL REVUES

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sacramento Poetry Center
Corner 25th and R Streets, Midtown Sacramento
Free: admission, merienda, drinks, parking
Note: Some mature content included.
Limited seating

Hosted by Sonny Alforque.

Invited Poets
Sacramento Poet Laureate Bob Stanley (Special Guest)
Rob Lozano
Mario Ellis Hill
Conrad Panganiban
Krystle Jong
Bria-Marie Darling

Proxy Readings of
Filipino works by
Al Robles
Mark Fabionar
Angela-Dee Alforque
Nick Carbo
Aurelio Alvero
Robert Kikuchi

Guest Readers
B. Matthew Rivera
Gladys Imperio-Acosta

Monday Sept. 7, 2009
Tim Kahl
Book Release Event for Possessing Yourself
7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at HQ for the Arts
Host: Bob Stanley
• drinks and a tantalizing spread will be offered •

Tim Kahl's work has been published in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Caliban, Connecticut Review, Fourteen Hills, George Washington Review, Illuminations, Indiana Review, The Journal, Limestone, Nimrod, Ninth Letter, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, South Dakota Quarterly, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Texas Review, and many other journals in the U.S. He has translated German poet Rolf Haufs, Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poets, Lêdo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira; and the poems of the Portuguese language's only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://www.greatame ricanpinup. blogspot. com/). Additionally, he is also the editor for Bald Trickster Press. He can also be found online at http://www.timkahl. com/.

"Part photo album, part diagram, part dream, Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself hacks a life out of the harsh terrain of experience. Here the poet shares with us the things that charge his emotions, his imagination, his self. That he does it without solipsism is a marvel; that he does it with honesty is a gift. In vivid narrative and acute lyric, these poems bring us close to the complexities of a whole human being. This is an exceptional book.
— Joshua McKinney

"As the author floats up into his marvelous dream of animals, the dark hand of history seizes his ankle and holds him. He is in hallucinatory agony, like the tethered Marcello Mastroianni at the beginning of Fellini's 8 1/2, and it propels us into the whole story: how to possess a life. There is the ghost of a pet dog, a hummingbird, cattle at a fair, a dead duck, a flirtatious moth. They are all intimations of a transcendent world we hardly dared hope for. Martin Luther and his minions—friends and family, both living and dead—press in at the edges, but the wonder remains. Kahl's Possessing Yourself never stops amazing us."
— Lawrence R. Smith

5:30pm to 7:30pm
The Sacramento Room
Central Library, Second Floor
828 I Street

Join  your fellow Citizens in an evening of fine verse!
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Hosted by Mary Zeppa and Bob Stanley

Featuring

Carlos Alcala, Sacramento Bee
Jeffrey Callison, KXJZ
Marcus Crowder, Sacramento Bee
Clare Ellis, the Sacramento Room
Richard Hansen, the Book Collector
Muriel Johnson, California Arts Council
Sheree Meyer, Chair, CSUS English Dept.
Don Nottoli, County board of Supervisors
Suzette Riddle, California Lectures
Ray Tatar, California Stage

“If a poem is written well,” Robert Pinsky said, “it was written with the poet’s voice and for a voice.  Reading a poem silently instead of saying a poem is like the difference between staring at sheet music and actually humming or playing the music on an instrument.”     

From 5:30 to 7:30, on a late summer evening, Sacramento’s readers and writers of poetry will have a chance to share their favorite poems at this festive event at the beautiful and historic Sacramento Room. The ten readers listed above will anchor the evening’s festivities; after that, it will be up to the rest of us. Bring a poem to read (not your own), and plan on a maximum of five minutes per reader. Please understand that our time is limited, and the open mic scheduling will be based on a first-come, first-served basis. So get there early, and be ready to hear a wide range of poetry in a wonderful setting.

To read a poem aloud is to give it new life.  At the Sacramento Poetry Center, we couldn’t agree more. This July marked our 30th anniversary of our commitment to “the rich and vigorous presence of poetry in contemporary life.” This event will be the first in a new series of SPC readings in the Sacramento Room and at the Central Library. For details on all the poetry activities presented by SPC see www.sacramentopoetrycenter.org

 

Monday, August 31, 2009
HOT POETRY IN THE PARK
with Garland Thompson, Jr., and Rob Lozano
7:30pm - 9:30pm
Fremont Park
15th & P Streets
Sacramento, CA

BYOBlanket out to the park for a hot nite by two smokin' performers.

Garland Thompson, Jr., is a poet, an actor, playwright and producer whose career spans the left and right coasts, and more than 20 years. As a poet and spoken word artist Garland has toured the U.S and Europe. Locally, Garland has performed at First Night Monterey, the Carmel Performing Arts Festival, The Austin International Poetry Festival (Austin TX) and he recently appeared in Carmel, California's Pacific Repertory Theater production of “Man of La Mancha.” For the last seven and a half years he has produced and hosted the weekly “Rubber Chicken Poetry Slam & Open Mic” at the East Village Coffee Lounge in Downtown Monterey, CA. He has been featured at, hosted and produced poetry readings and slams across the nation, and is known as the creator and producer of the "West Coast Championship Poetry Slam,” an annual event that was held in Big Sur, CA, at the Henry Miller Memorial Library from 1998 through 2007. You can find his work in “Spoken Word from Lollapalooza 94,” “Manic D press,” and, most recently, in “Sometimes in the Open, Poems from California’s Poets Laureate.” Garland has 25 years of experience in the entertainment industry, both behind the scenes in production, and on stage and in front of the camera. His recent projects include coordination of a reading of 28 new plays in 6 days at The Readers Theatre Series of New Play Readings at the 2009 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston-Salem, NC. He is getting ready to perform in a production of Shakespeare's "As You LIke It" at the Outdoor Forest Theatre in Carmel.

Rob Lozano was born in Quezon City, Philippines, edificated at University of Utah, with a BS in Anthropology. He cawwed poems as a crow and was very active in the Sacto. poetry scene through the 90's as Editor/Publisher of 'Say Yes' magazine and small press published books of poems for Gene Bloom and B.L. Kennedy and several other broadsides for poets gone and traveled and having hosted the first poetry slams in Sacto in 96' and 97'. He's been on radio and heard and seen on video and live from Sacramento to Yosemite to Fresno to San Francisco and Chico. He was part of ZRAIL artist collective with Vincent Kobelt, Mario Ellis Hill, Phil Goldvarg, Samuel Iniguez, Yaya Porras, Angelo Williams, Guy Ollison and a number of other gifted freestyle 'anti-injustice' poetic terrorists. His latest interest in Antonin Artaud is lodged solidly in the sense that as Nietzsche wrote of the death of God, Artaud wrote of the death of poetry. Rob Lozano's collaborations with Gilberto Rodriguez call attention, through Artaud and his doppelgangers, how psychologically emasculated poetry has become in this society resulting in the banalification of the mythic and authentic quality of poetry into a mere conceptual and easily digested palatable anti-poetic pablam. Fortunately where there is the demise of one, perhaps an always already authentically new ancient poetry’ will arise.

 

Monday, August 24th
Mari L’Esperance and Rebecca Foust
7:30pm.

Born in Kobe, Japan and raised in California, Guam, and Japan, Mari L’Esperance’s first full-length collection The Darkened Temple was selected by Hilda Raz for the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published by University of Nebraska Press in September 2008. A chapbook, Begin Here, was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize and published in 2000. L’Esperance’s poems have appeared in several literary journals, including the Beloit Poetry Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Poetry Kanto, and Salamander and in Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry by Sage Cohen (Writer’s Digest Books) and are forthcoming in the anthology When the Muse Calls: Poems for the Creative Life, edited by Kathryn Ridall. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, former New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow, and recipient of residency grants from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and writes in Oakland, California and is training to be a psychotherapist.

Rebecca Foust was born in Altoona, formerly one of the country’s great railroad towns, located in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania. Her teen years were spent in nearby Hollidaysburg, a tiny town surrounded by farmlands and forests, quarries and strip mines. After attending Smith College and Stanford Law School on scholarships, She practiced law in San Francisco for ten years.

She lives now with her husband and three teenagers in Northern California. Before starting Warren Wilson’s MFA program in 2008, her work was in advocacy and as a grass roots political organizer for parents of children with autism and other learning disorders.

Her recent poetry is widely published or forthcoming in small print journals including Margie, Nimrod, Poetry East, North American Review, The Hudson Review, Alehouse Press and Women’s Review of Books, earning awards including two Pushcart nominations in 2008. Her books Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes.

 

Monday, August 17th
Molly Fisk, Lawrence Dinkins Jr., Josh Neely
7:30pm.

Molly Fisk was born in San Francisco. She earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College/Harvard University, her M.B.A. from Simmons College Graduate School of Management, and began writing at the age of 35. She's the author of Listening to Winter, Terrain (with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer), the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems and the CD of radio commentary Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace. (See Books/CDs). Molly has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Marin Arts Council.

Lawrence Dinkins Jr. is a mainstay of the Sacramento Poetry scene. He is a dynamic performer of the written word in all its forms, and he is the proprietor of http://www.mybmsf.com.

Joshua Neely lives and works in Sacramento, and recently completed his MA in English at CSU Sacramento. He is an editorial assistant for Flatmancrooked Publishing and an assistant poetry editor for Narrative. Some of his poems have appeared in The Suisun Valley Review and Eclipse Literary Journal.

 

Monday, August 10th
Mariana Castro de Ali and Terry a O’ Neal
7:30pm.

Mariana Castro De Ali was born in Cd. Obregón, Sonora México in 1975. She lives works in California. She attended Cosumnes River College, Chabot College, is now pursuing Film Studies at UC Davis.

Terry a O’Neal has published poetry in numerous magazines, journals and newspapers. Her previous publications include three volumes of poetry, Motion Sickness, The Poet Speaks in Black and Good Mornin’ Glory; two children’s books, Ev’ry Little Soul and My Jazz Shoes; and the award winning family fiction novel Sweet Lavender.

Terry has been named among the most popular African American female writers of our time, featured in a book entitled “Literary Divas: The Top 100+ Most Admired African American Women in Literature”—a list of women who’ve left a mark on the wider world through their writing.

Her name in Lights: In recent times, Terry has ventured into the world of screenwriting, focusing on inspirational feature films for family audiences. Recently, she has completed a screenplay of her novel Sweet Lavender, which is currently resting in the hands of Hollywood producers.

In addition to her writing accomplishments, Terry is the editor of the annual youth poetry anthology, Make Some Noise! An anthology by inspired youth from all around the Unites States, Canada, Australia and Africa. In addition to her writing accomplishments, she is the Founder and Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Lend Your Hand, Inc. Educating the World’s Children.

“Her poems are reflective of African American culture and at the same time underscore our universal humanity.”—Dr. Kevin Starr, State Librarian of California

 

Monday, August 3rd
Noah “Supanova” Hayes and Stuart “SLiC” Canton
7:30pm. Hosted by Bob Stanley

Noah "Supanova" Hayes is a versatile entertainer who has been delighting audiences around the Sacramento area and abroad since 1982. He is a gifted poet, vocalist, dancer/choreographer, actor, and musician who enjoys sharing his talent and working in the community, teaching classes in the performing arts. In 1996, Noah became the youngest chorus member ever to perform with the Sacramento Opera Association. Internationally, Mr. Hayes has performed in England and Ireland, and locally with Sacramento Music Circus and the Sacramento Theatre Company.

In addition to his theatrical credits, Noah is an accomplished poet who has been published in a number of poetry publications in addition to two spoken word CD's : My Thoughts (2006), and WAKE UP! (2008). He was also a member of the 2005 and 2006 Sacramento Poetry Slam Teams that competed at the national poetry slam in Albuquerque, NM and Austin, TX.

Noah  earned a B.A. in Theatre this December from Sacramento State. On campus, he has performed with the CSUS Vocal Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Julie Adams. He has shared the stage with jazz legends Ray Nacimiento, Benny Waters, Jane Jarvis, Milt “The Judge” Hinton and many more.

In addition to his musical and theatrical credits, Noah is a former principal dancer and choreographer for Sacramento/ Black Art of Dance. He has also served as production manager in addition to his onstage duties for two seasons. Noah is also a proud member of the Actor’s Equity Association.

Stuart “SLiC” Canton is a poet who's broken into the Sacramento poetry scene with his unique blend of distinctly American styles, reminiscent of the work of Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, Charles Bukowski, and Tom Waits. His poetry has landed him page time in Rattlesnake Review, Poetry Now, Medusa's Kitchen, Brevities, and WTF. Weekly performances at Luna's Cafe have helped to make him a force in the poetry scene. Pick up SLiC's chaps and broadsides at The Book Collector, Luna's Cafe, and local coffeehouses.

 

Monday, July 27th
Shawn Pittard and LaVerne Frith
7:30pm.

Shawn Pittard is the author of These Rivers, a chapbook of poems from Rattlesnake Press. His poems, essays, and book reviews appear in a variety of publications, and he's written a screenplay, Junk Sick, with his brother, Trent. He holds degrees in fine arts, geography, and urban planning. He also writes for The Great American Pinup.

Laverne Frith is co-editor of the poetry journal Ekphrasis. His chapbooks are In the Translated Day (White Heron Press, 2004), In a Fast Food Place (Talent House Press, 1999), Sky After Summer Rain (Choice of Words Press) Drinking the Light (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and The Range of Seeing (Finishing Line Press, 2008). Among his many awards are a 2004 nomination for the Pushcart XXIX Prize by Adept Press, a runner-up finish in the 2004 & 2005 Louisiana Literature Award and honorable mentions in the Common Ground and Quercus competitions in 2004. Winner of the Nostalgia Poetry Award, he was awarded an HM in the New Millennium competition in April 2003 and semi-finalist in New Millennium in December 2003. His publication credits include Poetry New York, Louisiana Literature, The Christian Science Monitor, Sundog: the Southeast Review, The Comstock Review, The Montserrat Review, California Quarterly, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Perihelion, Main Street Rag, New Zoo Poetry Review, Blue Unicorn, Kimera, and others.

Monday, July 20th
Sacramento Poetry Center
7pm. Hosted by Rebecca Morrison

Monday night at SPC, enjoy music from local favorites Litany, plus catch two top poet/performers, including Sacramento's own representative for the National Slam Poetry finals!  First, local poets DJ Sho'Nuff and Jenilynn will perform spoken word and slam w/ musical accompaniment by Litany.  Included will be material to be performed by Jenilynn at the Slam nationals in November.  Then, SPC regulars Litany will play an electric set to rev up an already rockin' evening.  Open mic will follow for the inspired and the adventurous. If you feel so moved, we invite audience members to help contribute toward Jenilynn's transportation to the Slam nationals in Florida later this year.  Go, Sac-Town!

This show will be held at HQ Center for the Arts at 25th & 'R' (NOT Fremont Park, as originally scheduled).

Litany are a three-piece band from Sacramento who perform both acoustic and electric sets of non-traditional folk, rock, and prog rock.  They have played such northern California venues as Tower Records, Capitol Garage, The Distillery, Luna's, Butch 'n' Nellie's, Cesar Chavez Park, and the Sacramento Pride Festival, as well as numerous local Second Saturday events, poetry readings, and open mics.  This is their *fourth* time featuring for SPC, and they are thrilled to be returning.

DJ Sho' Nuff and Jenilynn are the hosts and producers of Live 'n' Direct, a weekly spoken word & music event at Butch 'n' Nellie's Coffee Co, recently voted "Best Poetry Open Mic" by the Sacramento News & Review.  Both Sho & Jen are noted local poet/performers, having appeared at numerous northern California venues.  In addition, Sho operates his own thriving music production business, & Jenilynn designs clothing for her own line, Interior Motives.  Most recently, Jenilynn was selected to represent Sacramento at the National Slam Poetry finals later this year, and is busily raising funds for her transportation.  They are thrilled to be sharing some of their acclaimed material w/ SPC audiences as co-features.

 

Monday, July 13
Danny Romero
Neal Whitman
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Reading
Free

.

Monday, July 6th
John Allen Cann
Bob Stanley
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Reading
Free.

Poet, scholar and teacher John Allen Cann recently led two 6-week classes at Room to Write, featuring American poets born in the late 20’s, and is planning a sequel to these, American Poets Born in the 30’s, for the fall.  Mr. Cann recently told fairytales at the Crocker Art Museum in concert with the current Maxwell Parrish exhibition.  He teaches English at Cosumnes River College and leads the long-running Kids&Words program at local schools.  John Allen is currently preparing an interview he made with A.R. Ammons in the late seventies, and a tandem essay comparing Ammons with Robinson Jeffers.

Bob Stanley has written poetry and volunteered in poetry organizations for over three decades. President of the Sacramento Poetry Center since 2006, Mr. Stanley also served on the board of Alameda Poets, and he has led workshops and readings all over Northern California. In 2008, Bob organized a gathering of poets laureate for the California Arts Council, and in 2009 he edited Sometimes in the Open, an anthology of poems by sixty-five laureates. His poems have won a number of awards, including the California Focus on Writers prize in 2006, and have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Bob got his BA in English at UCLA (1974) and an MA in Creative Writing from Sacramento State (2005). A fourth generation Californian, Bob and his wife Joyce have raised their four children in Sacramento. After 28 years working in the automotive parts business, Bob now teaches Creative Writing and English at Sacramento State University, Sacramento City College, and UC Davis Extension. His first chapbook, Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger, was released by Rattlesnake Press in 2009. Bob has been selected to be the poet laureate of Sacramento for a two-year term, beginning in July 2009.

 

Monday, June 29
Dorine Jennette
Valerie Fioravanti
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Reading
Free. Host: Frank Graham

Dorine Jennette has poems, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Journal, Ninth Letter, Coconut, Court Green, Memorious, Puerto del Sol, and the Georgia Review. She earned her PhD at the University of Georgia, and now earns her keep as a copyeditor for university presses. She live in Davis, California, with her husband, psychologist Dorje Jennette. Her forthcoming poetry collection from National Poetry Review Press entitled Grace by Degrees will be available in 2010.

Valerie Fioravanti writes fiction, essays, and prose poems. Her story collection, The Brooklyn Shuffle, was recently a finalist for the Tartt First Book Award. Her stories have appeared in North American Review, Cimarron Review, Hunger Mountain, and Green Mountains Review, among others. Her stories and prose poems have earned four Pushcart Prize nominations, and special mention in Pushcart Prize XXVIII. She received a Fulbright Fellowship (Italy) to research her novel, Bel Casino, which is one of two novels currently in the works. She teaches short story and multi-genre classes online for the UCLA Writers' Extension and private workshops from her home in midtown Sacramento. She has also taught writing for New Mexico State University and National University's MFA Program.

 

Saturday, June 27th, 2009
The Best Minds Of My Generation:
A Birthday tribute to Allen Ginsberg
(June 6, 1926 - April 5, 1997)
8pm - 11pm, Doors Open at 7:30pm
$5 at the door

Hosted by B. L. Kennedy. Presented by The Archives Group & The Sacramento Poetry Center. California Stage (formerly “The Stage”) 2509 R Street, 25th & R Streets.

Featuring: D. R. Wagner, Will Staple, Pat Grizzell, Charlene Ungstad, Kathy Kieth, Robert Grossklaus, Genelle Chaconas, Lytton Bell, David Gay, with music by the downtrodden saints

 

Monday, June 22nd
Julia Levine
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Reading
Free.

Julia Levine is the author of three books of poems Practicing for Heaven (Anhinga, 1999), Ask (University of Tampa Press, 2003), Ditch-Tender (University of Tampa Press, 2007). She has published in many journals, including Ploughshares, The Nation, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Poetry Review. She lives and works in Davis, California as a clinical psychologist.

Nancy Bodily has worked as a journalist and has recently set her sights on becoming a registered nurse. She lives in Davis with her husband and daughter, Cassidy. She is the DJ for Earth Mama Mountain Music Hour on KDRT in Davis. She is the next-door neighbor of James Lee Jobe.

 

Monday, June 15th
"An Evening with the Beats" with Clive Matson, Q. R. Hand, Jr., H. D. Moe
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
6pm Free Writing Workshop with Clive Matson
7:30pm. Reading
Free. Hosted by Rebecca Morrison.

An evening of writing and reading with legendary beat poets Clive Matson, Q. R. Hand and H. D. Moe. At 6 p.m., Clive Matson will host a free writing workshop entitled, "Let the Crazy Child Inside Write," for poets and non-poets. At 7:30, join us for a reading by Matson (winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award), Q. R. Hand (published in an African American anthology by Amiri Baraka) and H. D. Moe (jazz poet and friend of the late Jack Micheline). Free and open to the public.

Q. R. Hand, Jr., was originally published in the 1968 classic, Black Fire, an anthology of African American writing, edited by Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones) and Larry Neal, which has recently been reproduced by Black Classics Press. Q. R. is the author of three poetry books: i speak to the poet in man (jukebox press), how sweet it is (Zeitgeist Press), and whose really blues, new & selected poems (Taurean Horn Press). He is an original member of the Wordwind Chorus, a Bay Area quartet that has performed poetry with jazz for over twenty years and produced a cd: we are of the saying.  Martha Cinader Mims on the website, About.com: Poetry, wrote:  “In many ways the story of [Q. R.'s] life is an aspect of the legend of his generation; his personal approach to poetry is inextricable from his focus on the civil rights movement and social service.”

H. D. Moe is a living legend among Bay Area poets. One of the original “Baby Beats,” he was an important part of the scene that included Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. H. D. continues to write, “jazz poetry." Jack Micheline wrote of H. D. in 1973:  "David, poor bastard, is a genius/He is Alive/His work jumps for me,/Like a dark magician he HAS magic." H.D.'s latest book is Winged Wows (Beatitude Press).

Clive Matson arrived on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1960, a fresh-faced adolescent with a blank notebook under his arm. He quickly fell in with the Beat Generation – his first event was a reading at the Tenth Street Coffeehouse, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima. 

“The atmosphere was stunning. People were aware that new ground was opening every day, and most of the Beat luminaries were in that one small café.” Matson had already traveled a long way from the avocado ranch in Southern California where he grew up. He had dropped out of the University of Chicago and hitch-hiked around Europe; his education in life was accelerating. 

The proto-Beat Herbert Huncke became his second father, and Matson was captivated by John Wieners’ poetry and subsequently by Alden Van Buskirk’s. Diane di Prima published Matson’s first poems, and in the introduction John Wieners wrote, “One wonders about the nature of love in these poems. Are they vicious, or not?”

Matson and his first wife Erin Black immersed themselves in sex, hard drugs, and psychedelics of 1960s Bohemian life. Eventually Matson became overwhelmed and returned to the West Coast. He worked for Taxi Unlimited, a producers’ cooperative in Berkeley; briefly for the Free Clinic and for MOVE (men overcoming violence); and learned the craft of printing from Clifford Burke at Cranium Press. Psychotherapy, Vipassana meditation, and twelve-step programs became fixtures in his life.

Space Age (1969) displays his psychedelic years, Heroin (1972) outlines his struggle with addiction, On the Inside (1981) continues the political sight of his communist grandparents, and Equal in Desire (1982) shows feminism instructing his own sexuality. In 1978 he got involved in workshops and found he could make a living teaching creative writing. He returned to school in the 1980s and earned his MFA in poetry at Columbia University. He has taught more than 3,000 workshops nationwide, and his how-to text Let the Crazy Child Write! (New World Library, 1998), honoring the creative unconscious, is being used by a number of groups around the world.

Matson co-edited, with the late Allen Cohen, the anthology An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind - Poets on 9/11 (Regent Press, Oakland, 2002), which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. Earlier that year his seventh book, Squish Boots (2002), was placed, amazingly, in John Wieners’ coffin.

In 2004 a character in one of his unfinished stories began writing poems. His editor said, "Her stuff's junk," and Matson replied, "Get over it. They're not yours." Chalcedony's First Ten Songs (2008) obsess on sexual passion. The poems are an extension of Matson’s Beat training, as Chalcedony makes a vibrant call to body and spirit and earth through the sensory world.

That Matson ultimately emerged drug-free and healthy gave him full appreciation for 1960s passion and honesty. These qualities are crucially important, he thinks, for the current era. “Coming to terms with my youthful, energetic voice has been a challenge,” he admits. “It helps that I hear, in these poems, both an urgent need to connect and full cognizance of the difficulties.”

Mostly Matson writes from the itch in his body, and says he always has. He likes playing basketball, table tennis, and collecting minerals in the field. He lives in Oakland, California, where he helps bring up his eleven-year-old son, Ezra. Visit Clive Matson at matsonpoet.com.

 

Monday, June 8th
Craig Erick Chaffin
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Free. Hosted by Emmanuel Sigauke.

Craig Erick Chaffin goes by his initials because he doesn't like his first name, though he is trying to make peace with it now. Born in Ventura, California, in 1954, he graduated from UCLA in 1976, Summa Cum Laudanum, winning the top honors award in English, The Edward Niles Hooker Award, though he was not in the honors program. He later taught Family Medicine at UCI and was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians before the age of 40. Due to chronic spinal pain and manic-depression, he elected to retire on disability from medicine in his early 40s, which led to his discovery of the literary internet.

He published, and edited, The Melic Review: a journal that distinguished itself not only by its content but through the work of poets at its board in winning and/or placing in the InterBoard Poetry Competition repeatedly. He has won one poetry contest (Desert Moon Review, 2002) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in By Rose and Thorn. He quit counting publications several years ago but has been the featured poet in various journals over twenty times. He also keeps a blog, and provides tutoring through an intensive, fee-based, online poetry course.

In addition to poetry and criticism, Dr. Chaffin has published fiction and been a regular columnist for three magazines. Married to Kathleen Chaffin, he lives in Mendocino in Northern California where he enjoys his four children and one grandchild.

He is the author of two books Elementary (Mellen Poetry Press 1997) and Unexpected Light (Diminuendo Press 2009).

 

Monday, June 1st
Tchaka Muhammed, Dwight Sanders
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Free. Hosted by Bob Stanley.

Tchaka Muhammed, MsD. is a poet, storyteller, and Motivational Speaker. Known as the Father of the Birthing Project, Mr. Muhammed has supported the project on both the local and national level. He also serves as National Coordinator of Brother-Friends, the father’s program for the Birthing Project.

Dwight Sanders won the Sacramento County Poetry Out Loud competition in 2009. Dwight was the champion of his school, Inderkum High School, in both 2008 and 2009, and in 2009 his superb interpretation and performance won out over winners from twenty one regional high schools. In addition to his remarkable talents as a performer of poetry, Dwight is also an accomplished poet in his own right.

 

Monday, May 25th
Jasper Bernes, Joshua Clover
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Free. Hosted by Tim Kahl.

Jasper Bernes is the author of Starsdown (ingirumimusnocteet consumimurigni) and the chapbook Desequencer (TAXT). He lives in Albany, CA.

Joshua Clover is the author of two books of poems, The Totality for Kids (University of California Press, 2006), and Madonna anno domini (1997), which was chosen by Jorie Graham to receive the 1996 Walt Whitman Award. He is also a widely published critic and journalist, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the poetry editor for the Village Voice Literary Supplement. His contribution to the Modern Classics series for the British Film Institute, The Matrix, was published in 2005. He is an associate professor of English literature and critical theory at the University of California, Davis. His book of cultural and music criticism, 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This to Sing About, will be released in November of 2009.

 

Monday, May 18th
Kirk Parker, Cameron Parker, Joseph Pratt
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Free. Hosted by Rebecca Morrison.

Poets Kirk Parker and Carlton Parker grew up in Southern California and are part of a multi-talented family of literary and visual artists whose work was recently featured at the Fair Oaks Second Saturday (http://www.thenewartworksgallery.com/parker/).

Joseph Pratt is a talented young poet and short-story writer who grew up in the Bay Area.  He is a winner of the Sacramento Poetry Center's High School Poetry Contest.

 

Monday, May 11th
Farrah Field, Brad Buchanan
Sacramento Poetry Center Reading
7:30pm. Free. Hosted by Emmanuel Sigauke. Farrah and Brad perform "A Brief History of British Poetry from John Milton to Dylan Thomas". Sacramento Poetry Center. Refreshments. Open-Mic.

 

Monday, May 4
High School Poetry Contest Reading
7:30 PM
Hosted by Brad Buchanan

The Sacramento Poetry Center hosts its annual high school poetry contest featuring the original work of many of the Sacramento area’s aspiring poetic talents who have entered their work in the contest that the Sacramento Poetry Center sponsors.

Monday April 27, 2009 at 7:30 PM
Lucy Corin
Danny Romero
Host: Tim Kahl

Lucy Corin is a fiction writer. Her work has appeared in journals including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Conjunctions, and Fiction International and in anthologies such as Algonquin's New Stories from the South: The Year's Best (1997 and 2003), and The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Narrative. Her novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls was published by FC2 in 2004.She was a Walter E. Dakin fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference in 2006. Her latest book, The Entire Predicament, was published in 2007.

Sample Apocalypses
(from 18 forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review)

Bathing
One thing about after the apocalypse is you can’t get dirt on you—I mean you can, but you better not—it stings and itches like crazy, and I don’t know about you but I can’t get anything accomplished if I don’t feel clean.  Plus water’s a problem, even after everything.  And sand—you know I read in a book when I was a kid about how to wash by scrubbing with sand—but now that’s just as bad—what would you expect, it’s just another kind of dirt.  Everything makes for one rash or another, some with welts, some with, well, stinking welts, or welts that take over your whole body, or welts that blend in with other people’s welts, or the welts on the animals and trees, or the welts on the dirt and on the water.  The whole point of the apocalypse was to feel clean.  What a load.

After
What was left?  An enormous collection of transparent things.  We couldn’t be more minimal.  That plastic cup, including the ice.  Your lenses.  A stack of tracing paper.  Also tracing paper in the wind.  And wind.  And other “transparencies.”  Think of the bottles and bottles of water.  Including thinking.  A matter of clear glass versus clear plastic, vs. gin vs. vodka vs. tap vs. Voss.  A room with two doors in shotgun fashion.  I’ll stand in this one.  It looks like static coming down hand over fist.  Now, if you stood in that one you’d ruin it.  You can’t even come in because of the enormous collection of transparent things that are wobbling, invisibly.   

Apocalypses Past
After the apocalypse we didn’t even talk about all the crap we’d read about it before or seen in movies.  Like we were embarrassed of our whole species’ imagination.  Even what we’d gotten right just seemed lame and obvious.  It was a new taboo—talking about the predictions was this thing you just didn’t do.  As opposed to cannibalism which was pretty reasonable.  Or wanton sex, which was necessary, heroic even. One night or day or whatever it was, we were sitting around a campfire and I was like, what do I keep trying to remember?  And it was ghost stories.  I mean never in real life did I ever actually tell a ghost story. I just saw it in so many movies it seemed like, having been a kid, I must have done it.  Like steal cookies from a jar which I never did either.  Who has a cookie jar? No one ever again you can bet on it!  So there we were, all fucking and eating each other by the fire and I kept having all these apocalypse stories from my childhood right there on the tip of my tongue, but for everyone’s sake, I held back.

Apocalypse (with Tahiti)
Instead of the mood of the light from the kitchen in the dark in the heat with the fronds from her limber plants at her elbows suggesting Tahiti in the old days of painters now on coffee cups, she hoped a sheen would drop onto her imagination even as the earth fell away, as the animals died, as the fields fumed, and the turnips in the refrigerator shriveled into the faces of old ladies like: the one she would become if she only waited.  It took something psychic to refrain from relaxing into one of the voices in the town that flattened real life.  She took a piece of ice into her mouth and let it hurt, perhaps the last ice on earth.  She took a look at the house and felt pickled.  She turned her mind toward the several moments in her history that were worth considering, and watched the ideas turn in the atmosphere like model planets and then fail.  Home, home, home is where you used to think you wanted to go.


Danny Romero was born and raised in Los Angeles. He has degrees from University of California, Berkeley (BA, 1988) and Temple University (MA, 1993) in Philadelphia, where he taught writing (part-time) for many years. Romero’s poetry and short fiction have been published in literary journals throughout the country, including Colorado Review, Drumvoices Revue, Green Mountains Review, Paterson Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Ploughshares. His work can also be found in such anthologies as West of the West: Imagining California (1989), Pieces of the Heart: New Chicano Fiction (1993), Under the Fifth Sun: Latino Literature from California (2003), Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets (2006), Latinos in Lotusland: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern California Literature (2008) and Pow Wow: Charting the Faultlines in the  American Experience -  Short Fiction from Then to Now (2009). He is the author of the novel Calle 10 (1996) and two chapbooks of poetry, the latest, Land of a Thousand Barrios (2002). A new poetry collection is forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press. He teaches in the English Department at Sacramento City College.

WINTER
A few days before Christmas, the Sisters of Mercy loaded their Ford Escort with the goods they had collected at the nine o’clock folk Mass the last two Sunday mornings in a row. Three of them drove to the house on 85th Street. They parked across from the courtyard of an apartment building. A group of boys in their mid-teens dressed in white t-shirts and khaki pants stopped spray-painting their signs and symbols on the wall for a moment, while the nuns stepped out of the car. The boys turned down their music: scratchy recordings of scratchy old soul records. Some of them with their glassy eyes were familiar faces at Iglesia San Luis.

The driver, Sister Maria, was relieved not to see the fifth grade Chavez boy in among the crowd in the courtyard. She had noticed the boy had recently changed his hair style: now it was short, neatly trimmed and combed straight back like the older boys.
She knew he was not yet a part of their clique but was unsure how much longer he could resist.

The three nuns walked to the rear of the vehicle. Sister Katherine, the grammar school principal, took the car keys and opened the trunk. Her expression was stern, and she was feared by nun and student alike. She handed the younger nuns bags of groceries and red and green wrapped packages with pictures of toy trumpets and drums and snowy landscapes with Santa Claus and his reindeer on the paper.
The third nun was Sister Theresa, the eighth-grade teacher. She looked over at the house with her arms full and thought she saw the shadow of her student, Rosa, peering out from behind the bedroom curtain. Rosa did not seem as bright as the middle child, Emilio, though she was not the discipline problem he had become lately. The trio in light blue dresses and dark blue veils moved across the sidewalk.   

The yard was small and barren. The lawn was mostly dirt with a bit of weeds growing along the surrounding rusted fence. The elder nun led the way, unlatching the gate and continuing up onto the front porch. They were careful on the sagging wooden steps. The house, once white, now looked gray through the peeling paint. The screen door was bent out of shape and banged back and forth with the wind blowing down the street. When Sister Katherine rapped on the aluminum door a dog began barking in the next yard.

After a few seconds of muffled voices coming from inside the house the door finally opened. Only the outline of a woman could be seen through the dirty screen.
“Buenas dias, Mrs. Chavez,” said Sister Katherine. “We brought you some things. May we come in?”

Mrs. Chavez opened the door, unable to speak, and stepping aside. She looked over-worked and stoop-shouldered. Her eyes were swollen and rimmed in red. She smoothed the hair back out of her face.

The younger nuns said, “God Bless you,” as they passed her.

Inside it was crowded. Piles of laundry sat on the couch and a chair. On the television a cartoon rocket blasted off into outer space. On a shelf above were school pictures of the children in their uniforms: gray slacks and a white shirt for the boys, a blue plaid skirt and white blouse for the girl.

Sister Katherine put her packages down near the door. The others made space for the bags on a table and chair.

Outside on the street the activity had resumed. The music grew louder. A series of loud, shrill whistles began and was followed by the shouts of a gathering. Next cars could be heard speeding down the street.

In the middle of the room Sister Katherine held Mrs. Chavez and said a quiet prayer for the woman and her family, never once asking about her husband.

When the nuns left, the children filed out of the bedroom, moving awkwardly through the brightly colored packages and brown paper bags.

The older girl said, “You should have told them to go away!” She looked into a bag.
The boys were not as harsh. Emilio called out the items as he pulled them from a bag. “Hey, we got some Spam,” he said. “And we got some chili con carne... And some Ramen noodles... ‘ey, I think we bought those….”

The youngest Chavez handled the red and green packages. He shook them and held them up. They all seemed made out of lightweight plastic. Some of them rattled. He found a small round one with his name on the tag. He liked it immediately; it was small enough he could take it with him to second grade. A little patch of blue showed through a gap in the wrapping paper on which archangels blew their horns in triumph. The package slipped out of his hands and bounced clumsily away from him.
His mother still stood at the screen door. She could see the sun reflected in the rear window of the Ford Escort as it went down the street.

 

Monday April 20, 2009 at 7:30 PM
Mary Zeppa and Friends
Host: Rebecca Morrison
There will be no open mic

Mary Zeppa
with
Julia Connor, Victoria Dalkey, Patrick Grizzell, Kathryn Hohlwein, Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Ann Menebroker, Tom Miner, Stan Zumbiel

2009 marks SPC’s 30th anniversary.  “As a way of keeping that history alive, of celebrating all we’ve accomplished together,” Zeppa has invited a group of SPC’s “Veteran Voices” to join her for the second half of the evening.  Each of these readers (names and bios of confirmed readers appear below) will have 5 minutes.  Zeppa and friends will also read from the work of various people important to SPC’s history but unable to be a part of this evening.

Mary Zeppa, who has been active in the Sacramento Poetry Center since 1981, served as Executive Director from 12/85-9/87, was a Co-Editor of Poet News from 1984-1995 and was a founding Editor (1993) of The Tule Review.  Her poems have appeared in a variety of print and on-line journals, including Perihelion, Switched-on Gutenberg, Zone 3, The New York Quarterly and Permafrost, and in several anthologies. She is the author of two chapbooks, Little Ship of Blessing (Poets Corner Press, 2002) and The Battered Bride Overture (Rattlesnake Press, 2005). Zeppa, who currently serves as SPC’s Principal Archivist, was a 1996 recipient of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Community Arts and a 2008 recipient of a Resident Fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Blessing what’s yet to be lost
        
Blessed be the cerebral cortex:
its bustle, its chatter, its crowd.
Blessed be the amygdala rocking
the curly-haired, dimpled, dead child.

Blessed be the spine that will hold us
to the task, to the thing that gets done.
Blessed be the life she’s forgetting,
my mother the obdurate one.

Blessed be the strength she remembers.
Blessed be the hay bales she tossed.
Blessed be the rib-cage rasp of the thin.
Blessed be our rattling embrace.

By Mary Zeppa

Julia Connor, an award-winning poet, a potter, a painter, a teacher and Sacramento’s current Poet Laureate, was a long-time member of SPC’s Board of Directors.  Connor served as Vice-President and as Program Director; she was a Founding Editor of The Tule Review.

Victoria Dalkey, poet and long-time Art Correspondent to the Sacramento Bee, served as SPC’s Program Director.  Dalkey was a prime mover in both the Landing Signals anthology (1986) and In’ Lak Esh, a collaboration between 30 poets and 30 visual artists (1991).

Patrick Grizzell, poet and songwriter, helped renovate SPC’s first home at Sierra 2.  Grizzell served as, to name but a few, Art Director, Managing Editor of Poet News, Program Director and Executive Director of SPC.  He was also a Founding Editor of The Tule Review.

Kathryn Hohlwein, poet, CSUS professor emerita of English, long-time Poetry and Art Editor of Studia Mystica, founder of The Readers of Homer, was present at the creation of The Poet Tree (now dba SPC). Hohlwein read at TPT’s very first fundraiser:  October 14, 1979.

Susan Kelly-DeWitt, an award-winning poet and a visual artist, served as SPC workshop facilitator, study group leader and Program Director.  Kelly-DeWitt edited a letter-press issue of Quercus.  For several years, SPC’s readings were held in her restaurant , Hannibal’s Poetry Café.

Annie Menebroker, widely-published poet and former editor of several small press journals, was a long-time member of SPC’s Board of Directors.  Menebroker was the Center’s Librarian, a regular contributor to Poet News and an editor of the Landing Signals print anthology.

Tom Miner, poet, teacher and former editor-and-publisher of the small press journal Pinchpenny, was present at the creation of TPT (dba SPC).  Miner was a regular contributor to SPC’s early publications: his “How to Humor a Poem” appears in January 1980 issue of Poet Tree News.

Stan Zumbiel, poet and long-time high school English teacher, has been a member of SPC’s Board of Directors for more than 20 years.  Zumbiel has served as Vice President, as President, as Membership Secretary, as Poet News distributor and, more recently, as reading host.

Monday, March 16, 2009
7:30 PM
Hosted by Rebecca Morrison

Shoot the TV, unplug the computer, ignore the weather and come out for some tears, laughs and insightful reflections.  You can arrive and leave when you want and our feelings won’t be hurt–at least not much!

Robin Aurelius: Love Boat entertainer with Mary McGrath, tongue in cheek, crack-up humor, hoarder but has every imaginable tool as a great neighbor, cleans everyone’s street gutter, will clean yours and pick your oranges

Mary McGrath:  Storyteller, most interesting gig and audience was a family concert with the Sacramento Symphony (one of the last they performed, draw your own conclusion). Bird watcher, just discovered four heron nests within sight of big buildings downtown, would like a wild garden full of resident singing birds

Bill Davis: Born up a Kentucky holler, international justice systems reformer: Kosovo, Palestine (not going so well), Argentina, Georgia (a little trouble with the Russians), ex Peace Corps Chile

Connee Davis: Quiet seer/poet of details missed by most, retired speech therapist, world traveler, also of Chile Peace Corps fame

Andy Anderson: Thousands of irreverent poems, a few should pass muster, life devoted to Indian health care, Europe-phile, loves the bike trail, also Peace Corps Chile, teases and lies with ease

Mary Antoine: Used to drive race cars, now racing attorney/RN specialist in health law, real redhead raising a real teenager

Debra DeBondt: At last, an ex Peace Corps volunteer from another country, Kenya, just out of range of coastal bandits, dedicated to learning how to teach skills to illiterates like most of us in the Poetry Gaggle