Kathleen de Azevedo’s novel of Brazilian American immigrants, Samba Dreamers (University of Arizona Press) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award and won a 2007 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles National Literary Award and the 2012 Latino Books into Movies Award. Her short stories and articles have appeared in many publications including the Los Angeles Times, Américas, Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Greensboro Review, Cimarron Review, Gulf Coast, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, and the anthologies New Stories of the Southwest (Ohio University Press) and Latinos in Lotus Land (Bilingual Review Press). She also has written web content for various online sites catering to writers and those interested in Latino literature. She was born in Rio de Janeiro but currently lives in San Francisco.
Lyle Daggett’s most recent books of poems are All Through the Night: New and Selected Poems and The First Light Touches Me, both from Red Dragonfly Press. His poems, translations, essays and book reviews have appeared in Pemmican, Blue Collar Review, Blue Lyra Review, the anthology Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath (The Backwaters Press), and other publications. He does not have an MFA, and has not received a grant or an award. He lives in Minneapolis, where he works in a large office in a large company in a gray cubicle in a room full of gray cubicles. His blog is A Burning Patience, http://aburningpatience.blogspot.com/, which he uses to talk about poetry and related things.
Sharon Doubiago’s memoir, My Father’s Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume One, November 2009, Wild Ocean Press, was a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards in Creative Non Fiction, 2010. Volume Two was published in 2011. Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems, was published by the University of Pittsburgh, November 2008, and received the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poet Award, and was a finalist in the Paterson NJ Poetry Prize, Feb 2010. She has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem Hard Country (West End Press), the booklength poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh) which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, the poetry collection, Body and Soul, which was a PEN USA West, Poetry Book Award Finalist, 2001, and the story collections, El Niño (Lost Roads Press), and The Book of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (Graywolf Press) which was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list: Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction, the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast, and a California Arts Council Award. She is a board member of PEN Oakland. For two decades she has been writing Son, a memoir about the mother-son relationship, for which she has received two Oregon Institute of Literary Art Fellowships and other significant awards. Her new collection of memoir stories, Why She Loved Him, is circulating, and her new memoir, Ramon/Ramona, about her first love at thirteen, a Kumeyaay of the tribe chronicled in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona, is nearing completion. She has published over a hundred essays—from the personal and creative, to the scholarly. For the past decade she has lived in San Francisco and has completed Naked to the Earth, a poetry manuscript that includes the two poems here.
About Martín Espada. Called “the Latino poet of his generation,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published more than fifteen books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest collection of poems, The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011), is the recipient of the Milt Kessler Award, a Massachusetts Book Award and an International Latino Book Award. The Republic of Poetry (Norton, 2006) received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A previous book of poems, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Other poetry collections include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has received other recognition such as the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Robert Creeley Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His work has been widely translated; collections of poems have been published in Spain, Puerto Rico and Chile. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South End Press, 1998), has been banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A graduate of Northeastern University Law School and a former tenant lawyer, Espada is currently a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Ray Gonzalez is the author of 14 books of poetry including the forthcoming Beautiful Wall (BOA Editions). He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
Susan Gubernat’s first book of poems, Flesh (Helicon Nine Editions), won the Marianne Moore Prize; her chapbook Analog House, was published in 2011 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Michigan Quarterly, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Stand (U.K.), The Yalobusha Review, among others. An opera librettist, her major work, Korczak’s Orphans (composer: Adam Silverman), has been performed in a number of venues, and by a number of companies, including in the VOX New Composers Series of the New York City Opera and by the Opera Company of Brooklyn. Gubernat is a Professor in the English Department at California State University, East Bay, where she inaugurated and now advises the Arroyo Literary Review. Her awards and honors include residencies at the MacDowell, Millay, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo colonies, as well as artist’s fellowships from the states of New York and New Jersey.
Uri Hertz is a poet, performer, critic and editor. He is known for founding (w/Doren Robbins) and editing Third Rail, an international literary/arts magazine published in the 1970s and 80s. Hertz continues Third Rail online at www.literatureandarts.com, featuring a new festschrift for Kenneth Rexroth. He presented findings from his research on the impact of Rexroth’s jazz poetry on the 1950’s San Francisco literary bohemia at the 2011 PAMLA Symposium at Claremont College. Hertz’s own recorded work in poetry & jazz was released as a CD under the title Inner Cities. His book, Poems Torn from a Life, published by highmoonoon press, was used as a textbook in a Special Lectures on American Literature course taught by Prof. Tetsuya Taguchi, Dean, Graduate School of Letters at Kobe University, Japan. Hertz presented his “Artaud in Mexico” essay at Stanford University and gave a series of lectures on “Walter Benjamin in Baudelaire’s Paris” at the New College of California.
Andrea Hollander (formerly Andrea Hollander Budy) has published four full-length poetry collections, most recently Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982 – 2012 (Autumn House Press, 2013). Her honors include the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. For twenty-two years Hollander was the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she received the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Now a resident of Portland, Oregon, she is the recipient of a 2013 Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her website is www.andreahollander.net.
Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless And Possible (University of Washington Press, 1210). He teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane, Washington.
Plato’s Screw is L.D. Janakos’s forthcoming second novel. Her first novel the oldest show (after the abandonment) is published by Highmoonoon Press, and she is presently working on a second edition. She is the recipient of a Bumbershoot Literary Award and a University of Oregon Fiction Award.
Stephen Kessler is the author, most recently, of Scratch Pegasus (poems, Swan Scythe Press) and Poems of Consummation by Vicente Aleixandre (translation, Black Widow Press). He is the editor of The Redwood Coast Review. “Barrio Santa Cruz” is from a work in progress. For more, go to: www.stephenkessler.com.
Kitasono Katue (1902–1978) was the best known Japanese poet-artist in Europe and the US during the middle half of the 20th century. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art held the first solo exhibit of his art outside Japan from August 3-December 1, 2013 (http://lacma.org/art/exhibition/kitasono-katue-surrealist-poet). Active from the mid-1920s as a pioneering avant-garde spirit, Kitasono made a priority of finding common ground with poets, artists and writers in Europe and the Americas. First entranced by Dadaism and Surrealism, he also thoroughly absorbed the ideas of Futurism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. His poems were often published in poetry and visual art journals, and he served as an editor and graphic designer for some of these, including the journal VOU, published from 1935 to 1940, and then again from 1945 until his death in 1978. Kitasono edited and designed more than 500 magazines and poetry books, and created numerous covers for novels, trade journals and commercial magazines. Plastic Poems, which fit in a category more broadly referred to as visual poetry, adorned many of his book covers; Kitasono began to produce Plastic Poetry after being inspired by the photographs done by members of the VOU group. In the last twelve years of his life, Kitasono continued to experiment with the limitless field of visual poetry, maintaining the clean form and finely conceived pairings of images seen in his earliest successful text poems (Hollis Goodall).
Bill Mohr is the author or editor of eight books of poetry or criticism, among them Hidden Proofs and Bittersweet Kaleidoscope. His poems and prose poems have appeared in dozens of magazines (Antioch Review, Blue Mesa Review, Caliban (on-line), OR, Pool, Santa Monica Review, Skidrow Penthouse, Sonora Review, Spot, Wormwood Review, and Zyzzyva) as well as over a dozen anthologies. In 1993 New Alliance Records released his spoken word collection, Vehemence. Jose Rico and Robin Myers are currently translating a collection of his poems to be published in Mexico in 2014. In addition to publishing landmark collections of Los Angeles poets such as The Streets Inside: Ten Los Angeles Poets (1978) and Poetry Loves Poetry in 1985, he was the editor of Momentum Press from 1974 to 1988 and brought out books by poets such as Alicia Ostriker, Jim Krusoe, Holly Prado, Kate Braverman, Jim Moore, Harry Northup, Joseph Hansen, and Leland Hickman. Mohr is the recipient of over a half-dozen artist-in-residence grants and is currently an associate professor at California State University, Long Beach, where he teaches 20th century American Literature and is a core member of the MFA faculty. He has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego; in 1996, he was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. Check out his weblog at http://www.billmohrpoet.com.
Ed Pavlić’s most recent books are Visiting Hours at the Color Line (National Poetry Series, Milkweed Editions, 2013), But Here Are Small Clear Refractions (Achebe Center, 2009), Winners Have Yet to be Announced: A Song for Donny Hathaway (UGA P, 2008) and Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006). His other books are Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon P, 2001) and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture (U Minn P, 2002). He teaches at the University of Georgia and lives with his family in Athens, Georgia.
Carlos Reyes, poet and translator, lives and works in Portland, Oregon when not on the move. Traveling is a big part of his life and whether he journeys to Alaska, Ecuador, France, India, Ireland. Panama, or Spain, those experiences inform his poetry. Last November he was at the Fundación Valparaíso in Mojácar, Spain on a second fellowship, and in April he was poet-in-Residence at Acadia National Park in Maine. May and June found him in Ireland where he gave a series of readings, and had time to write a handful of poems. He read at the Mt Shannon Arts Festival, The White House and The Nail in Limerick. He was a finalist for the Desmond O’Grady 2012 Poetry Prize. His latest book of poems is Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart (2012). In 2013 his selected translations, Poemas de amor y locura / Poems of Love and Madness, was published. His book of short prose pieces about his forty years of living and traveling in Ireland, “The Keys to the Cottage,” is finished and looking for a publisher while he puts the finishing touches on a new poetry manuscript, “The Boundary Hill.”
Doren Robbins’ recent collections of poetry include Driving Face Down (awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2000) and My Piece of the Puzzle (awarded the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award). Robbins is also the author of the short-fiction/prose poem-sequence, Parking Lot Mood Swing: Autobiographical Monologues and Prose Poetry (Cedar Hill Press 2004). His most current collection is Amnesty Muse (Lost Horse Press 2011). A new book review of Kenneth Rexroth’s In the Sierra: Mountain Writings appears at Third Rail (www.literatureandarts.com). In 2014 Imaginaryfriendpress will publish the chapbook, Title to Pussy Riot with cover art by Kitasono Katue. He teaches at Foothill College.
Lindsay Sauln is an Anthropology and Creative Writing Major at Foothill College. This is her first publication.
Nodelyn Lago Smith lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband and three children. This is her first publication.
John Solt is a poet, translator and scholar. Recently he has been involved working with curators at Los Angeles museums on producing avant-garde Japanese exhibits: Yamamoto Kansuke’s photography (“Japan’s Modern Divide” at the Getty Museum), bookbinding (“Ohie Toshio and the Perfection of the Japanese Book” at LACMA); and graphic art/photography (“Kitasono Katue: Surrealist Poet” at LACMA).
Julia Stein’s just released her fifth book of poetry What Were They Like? Previously she has edited Walking Through a River of Fire 100 Years of Triangle Factory Fire Poems and edited Every Day Is an Act of Resistance: Selected Poems by Carol Tarlen by the brilliant working class writer who died in 2004.
David Swanger has published four books of poetry, two chapbooks, and poems in various anthologies and journals. Awards include fellowships from the N. E. A. and the California Arts Council. His most recent book, Wayne’s College of Beauty, won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize. Currently, he serves as Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County.
Marianne Villanueva is a writer from the Philippines who has written three short story collections: Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila, Mayor of the Roses, and The Lost Language. She also co-edited a Filipino women’s anthology, Going Home to a Landscape. Her work has been widely anthologized, most recently in Manila Noir, edited by Jessica Hagedorn. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is completing her first novel.
Michael Warr is author of The Armageddon of Funk, We Are All The Black Boy, and co-editor of Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex, all from Tia Chucha Press. His literary awards include the Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and most recently the 2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, and 2012 Poetry Honor Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Warr’s most recent book, The Armageddon of Funk, has been called “…a poetic soundtrack to Black life.” A review in The Crisis Magazine, which was founded by W.E.B. DuBois, noted “There is resonance in Warr’s work that…deserves our attention.” A frequent collaborator with musicians, visual and performing artists, Michael’s poems have been dramatized on stage, depicted on canvas, and set to original music composition. His blog posts, links to recordings and videos, samples of what he calls “Poetic Memoir,” can be found at Armageddonoffunk.com.
Lenore Weiss completed a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in many journals including San Francisco Peace and Hope, The Portland Review, La Más Tequila Review, Digital Americana, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Nimrod International Journal, Copper Nickel, and Bridges: A Jewish Feminist Journal. West End Press published her full poetry collection (2012), “Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island.” She serves as the copy editor for The Blue Lyra Review.
Cecilia Woloch is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Carpathia, published by BOA Editions in 2009 and a finalist for the Milton Kessler Award in 2010. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, CEC/ArtsLink International, the California Arts Council and others. A member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Southern California, she also conducts workshops for writers throughout the United States and around the world. She spends part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles, Atlanta, Shepherdsville (Kentucky), Paris, France and a small village in the lower Carpathian Mountains of southeastern Poland.
Kim Silveira Wolterbeek’s fiction has appeared in numerous periodicals, including Bellowing Ark, Buffalo Spree, CALYX, City Primeval: Narratives of Urban Reality, New Millennium Writings, Other Voices, Ratapallax, Room of One’s Own, Santa Clara Review, West, Wind Review, Willow Springs, and been anthologized in A Line of Cutting Women (CALYX). She has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of The Glass Museum (Bellowing Ark Press). The title story of this collection was selected for Broadcast on National Public Radio’s The Sound of Writing. Her first novel, A Place of Light, will be published in late Fall 2013 (Cuidono Press).
Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems The Dream of a Moral Life won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry, including Hands; Days; Braver Deeds, which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; and Pleasure. He is the co-editor of The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated and printed limited edition books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing and directs the Cowell Press at the University of California Santa Cruz.