2024 Poetry Flash Reading Series

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

1 FEBRUARY 2024 — thursday

C.S. Giscombe and Mary Gilliland

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and eco-activist Mary Gilliland, The Devil's Fools, and poet and professor C.S. Giscombe, Negro Mountain, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Mary Gilliland's recent poetry collections are The Devil's Fools, winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden, Bright Hill Press Chapbook Prize-winner. Cynthia Hogue says, "[This] magisterial new collection, The Devil's Fools, opens in myth and magic, but its vast reach is deeply rooted in her reverence for earth and all earthly creations.…At once eco-sensual and erudite, Gilliland writes a nuanced poetry that richly investigates humanity's contradictory capacities to destroy and to love." Mary Gilliland is a recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant, and the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry. Her forthcoming books, In the pool of the sea's shoulder and Ember Days, will be published in 2024. She lives in Ithaca, New York.
C.S. Giscombe's new collection of poetry is Negro Mountain. Tyrone Williams says, "In the dreamscapes of these poems, survival depends on both 'Negro luck' and a knack for being a bit 'country.' A wolf (or coyote) in sheep's clothing, the fool on the hill is s/he who exposes 'the story's / sham,' that 'tiresome trope' of captivity or freedom, criminality or servitude, violence or resignation. Negro Mountain turns the tables on the sacrosanct." C.S. Giscombe is the author or co-author of fourteen books, including Giscome Road, winner of the Carl Sandburg Prize; Prairie Style, an American Book Award-winner; Border Towns; Ohio Railroads; and Train Music, in collaboration with book artist Judith Margolis. His honors include the African-American Literature and Culture Society's Stephen Henderson Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is professor and the Robert Hass Chair in English at University of California, Berkeley

18 FEBRUARY 2024 — sunday

Andrena Zawinski and Jerry Ratch

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and flash fiction writer Andrena Zawinski, Born Under the Influence, and novelist and poet Jerry Ratch, A Body Divided, memoir, who will read some of his poems accompanied by live music, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Jerry Ratch's most recent poetry books are Follow Your Heart, or Your Dreams, Abundance: Selected Poems, and A Few Guilty Pleasures: New Poems. The author of eighteen book of poetry, he is also the author of seven books of prose, including Wild Dreams of Reality, a novel, and A Body Divided, a memoir, the story of a one-armed boy growing up in a two-fisted world, in the time of polio. Lawrence Ferlinghetti said of it, "A gritty and valiant story…I would be glad to recommend it." Richard Ford wrote about Wild Dreams of Reality, "The almost, but not quite innocent directness of Ratch's savvy little novel is irresistible to me. I read it in a sitting. I'm glad real writers still want to write books this way." Jerry Ratch's poems have been published in Antioch Review, Beatitude, Carolina Quarterly, Ironwood, Louisville Review, Maryland Literary Review, Milvia Street Journal, Negative Capability, Slant, and elsewhere. Most of his titles are available as Kindle Books from Amazon, or through his website: www.jerryratch.com. He lives in Oakland.
Andrena Zawinski's new poetry collection is Born Under the Influence; her recent flash fiction collection is Plumes and Other Flights of Fancy. Born Under the Influence, through a wide range of craft from narrative free verse through European and Asian forms, grapples with the trials, anger, rebellion, survival, and joys influenced by gender, class, nature, pop culture, and contemporary history. Mary Mackey says of her work, "Andrena Zawinski is a poet of rare talent and radical empathy who combines the straightforward, take-no-prisoners, blue collar directness of a steelworker's daughter in her narratives, along with the rules of formal verse, creating lines which blossom into poems of memory, rebellion, longing, righteous anger, and—above all—survival. These poems are tough, smart, and beautifully crafted." Andrena Zawinski has also published three previous full-length poetry collections, four chapbooks, and edited two anthologies. Her work has received accolades for lyricism, form, and social concern including a Kenneth Patchen Poetry Prize and PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she makes her home in Alameda, California.

22 FEBRUARY 2024 — thursday

Andrea Cohen and Katie Peterson

Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Andrea Cohen, The Sorrow Apartments, and Katie Peterson, Fog and Smoke: Poems, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PST (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Katie Peterson's new book of poetry is Fog and Smoke. Booklist wrote in a starred review, "Each line shines in the sun like stained glass. Fog and Smoke is a triumph of observation and intimacy that invigorates the reader to act for the natural world." Poems from the collection have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Yale Review, among other publications. Katie Peterson's previous book, winner of the Omnidawn Open Book Prize, is Life in a Field, with photographer Young Suh, "a comedy about climate change, in which a girl and a donkey become friends, then decide to marry time." Other previous collections include This One Tree; Permission; The Accounts, winner of the Rilke Prize; and A Piece of Good News, finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her work has appeared in Journal of Alta California, Literary Imagination, and Poetry Northwest. She teaches at the University of California, Davis.
Andrea Cohen's new book of poetry is The Sorrow Apartments. Christian Wiman says of her poems, "One is caught off guard by their cumulative force. This is work of great and sustained attention, true intelligence, and soul." She is the author of eight collections of poetry; her previous books include Everything and Nightshade. Publishers Weekly said of Everything, "…A master stylist, Cohen uses em dashes and commas with an exactness that allows each poem to become elliptical and self-contained. These poems take no 'thing' for granted, not even the concept of eternity, as Cohen declares in 'Openings': 'I didn't want// forever forever.' It is the wit that astounds here, and an intelligence that sees the world anew." Andrea Cohen's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and several residencies at MacDowell. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches poetry at Boston University.

7 APRIL 2024 — sunday

Rebecca Foust and Janée J. Baugher

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Janée J. Baugher, Seattle poet and author of The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction, and Rebecca Foust, Only, Marin County Poet Laureate emerita, 2727 California Street, Berkeley, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Poet Janée J. Baugher is the author of the only book of its kind, The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction. WomensVoicesforChange.org calls it, "a guidebook that comprehensively treats the subject of ekphrasis at the same time it provides an inspiriting and practical guide to those who aspire to practice it." She's published two books of poetry, The Coordinates of Yes and The Body's Physics, which David Roderick says "demonstrates extraordinary poetic vision, and her lyric style is both tender and resolutely connected to the body." A featured poet both at the Library of Congress and on Seattle TV, Janée Baugher was a judge for the 2023 "Frame to Frames" ekphrastic film prize (Fotogenia Festival in Mexico City). As a collaborator she's had poems adapted for the stage and set to music at Interlochen Center for the Arts (Michigan), University of Cincinnati, Contemporary Dance Theatre (Ohio), Dance Now! Ensemble (Florida), Otterbein University, and University of North Carolina-Pembroke. Baugher is an assistant editor at Boulevard magazine and recipient of a 2024 CityArtist grant from the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture.

Rebecca Foust's seventh poetry collection is Only. Ellen Bass says, "In Only, her luminous new collection of poems, Rebecca Foust's gifts are in full flower. Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical, these poems wrestle with the big questions—religion, immigration, climate change, politics, parenting, autism, and death—all on a deeply intimate level. Like an impressionist painter, she uses light to capture the immediacy of the present, the passage of time." Her previous collections include Paradise Drive; All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song; in collaboration with Lorna Stevens, God, Seed: Poetry & Art about the Natural World; and three chapbooks, including The Unexpected Ordnance Bin. Her work has appeared in The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, and elsewhere. Her honors include the 2023 New Ohio Review prize, 2020 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry judged by Kaveh Akbar, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. As Marin County Poet Laureate 2017-2019, her program, "Poetry as Sanctuary," featured readings by local immigrant poets.

28 APRIL 2024 — sunday

Cintia Santana and Dan Alter

Poetry Flash presents a reading by Dan Alter, My Little Book of Exiles, and Cintia Santana, The Disordered Alphabet, 2727 California Street, a cooperative art space, Berkeley, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Dan Alter's debut poetry collection is My Little Book of Exiles. Matthew Zapruder says, "'Could I have come from nowhere,' asks this poet, who searches his irretrievable past and mysterious present for meaning. Through gorgeous, ambitious, impeccable lyrics, provisionally and with a deep reverence for mysteries, he finds it again and again. This smart, funny, sad, kind book is an act of salvage, and solidarity, a pleasure to read, a wonderful achievement and a gift to us all." Dan Alter's writing can be understood as a spanning of many worlds and distances. He has published poems widely in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and ZYZZYVA. He has been a fellow of the Arad Arts Project, and a finalist for the Rosenberg Award for Poems on the Jewish Experience. He is a member of the Community of Writers at Olympic Valley, and holds an MFA from Saint Mary's College of California. He makes his living as an electrician and lives in Berkeley.

Cintia Santana's debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet, was short-listed for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance 2023 Golden Poppy Award in Poetry and received the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver Medal in Poetry. David Baker says, "Cintia Santana is a superb new poet, serving up gusts of generative energy and acute intelligence. There's wordplay galore in The Disordered Alphabet, but so much more: temptation and swoon, confession, exposure, and the kind of daring formal agitation that accomplishes one rigorous shape after another to enable Santana's discoveries and her complex harmonic voicings. The alphabet may be disordered, and the cosmos awhirl, but this book is a crystalline achievement of rapture, balance, and brilliance." Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, the Best of the Net Anthology 2023, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, Split this Rock, and numerous journals. Her honors include fellowships from CantoMundo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. She teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and in English at Stanford University.

19 MAY 2024 — sunday

Sixteen Rivers Press: Christina Lloyd, Murray Silverstein, Alice Templeton

Poetry Flash presents a Sixteen Rivers Press poetry reading with Christina Lloyd, Women Twice Removed, Murray Silverstein, Red Studio, and Alice Templeton, The Infinite Field, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event and many others are (or will be) posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Christina Lloyd's new book of poems is Women Twice Removed. Caroline Goodwin says, ""In [this] haunting and extraordinary collection, we experience the search for a true ancestral home. Where does the speaker end and the (grandm)other begin? Which is the language of connection and which of separation? From squid ink to paintings to feral cats to sculptures to mummies to family portraits, these poems navigate the tensions and energies that exist across cultures and through deep time. With a deftness and specificity that is both gorgeous and arresting, they sing out over a familiar meadow, inviting us to remember our own versions of 'a finger cut so deep // it became a gill.'" Christina Lloyd holds a PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University, and her work has appeared in publications including Poetry Daily, Poet Lore, The Crab Creek Review, and EcoTheo. She lives in San Francisco.

Murray Silverstein's new book of poems is Red Studio. Naomi Shihab Nye says, "Somehow he can 'soothe us with the solace of eternity' and exquisitely prescient present-ness more than just about anyone else. These are terrific poems! Red Studio is a full embrace." His previous collections are Any Old Wolf (2007), winner of the Independent Publisher's Bronze Medal for Poetry, and Master of Leaves (2014). Widely published in journals, including Rattle, ZYZZYVA, and Nimrod, he was an architect for forty years and co-authored four books on architecture, including A Pattern Language and Patterns of Home. He lives in Oakland, California.

Alice Templeton's new book of poems is The Infinite Field. D.A. Powell says, "…Templeton's poems…possess a dreamlike beauty, haunted—or I should say inhabited—by memories of childhood, family, spiritual community, and the culverts, creeks, and rivers of Tennessee. I think of these poems as quilts, arrangements of the remnants of the past put into fresh and surprising combinations: No matter where they go, they carry the texture and warmth of home." Her poems and short stories have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Calyx, North American Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is also the author of a critical book on Adrienne Rich's poetics, and scholarly articles on contemporary poetics, cultural criticism, and literary theory. Originally from Tennessee, Alice Templeton lives in Point Richmond, California.

20 JUNE 2024 — thursday

Carolyn Tipton and Sandra Yannone

Poetry Flash presents a reading by poet and translator Carolyn Tipton, The Poet of Poet Laval, and Sandra Yannone, The Glass Studio, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 7:00 pm PDT (poetryflash.org).

Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
Featured books for this reading will be available for signing at the event and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event and many others are (or will be) posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA.

MORE ABOUT THE READERS

Carolyn Tipton's debut book of poems is The Poet of Poet Laval. She is also a noted translator from Spanish, and has translated two books of poems by Rafael Alberti. The first, To Painting, poems by Rafael Alberti, won the National Translation Award. It was a finalist for the PEN West Award in Literary Translation and was selected by Robert Hass for Poet's Choice, both a newspaper column and then an anthology from Ecco Press. Her second Alberti translation, Returnings: Poems of Love and Distance, won the Cliff Becker Translation Prize. Stephen Kessler says, "The musical language that drives these urgent poems is echoed exquisitely in Carolyn Tipton's translations." Her poems and translations have appeared in Partisan Review, Two Lines, Norton's World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time, and elsewhere. Among her honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born and raised in Berkeley, she lives in Kensington, California.

Sandra Yannone's new book of poems is The Glass Studio. D'or Seifer says, "With crystalline imagery and sensitivity, The Glass Studio both marvels at and mourns the fragility and beauty of human resilience, with a sense of loss and longing braided into these textured and musical poems." Sandra Yannone's first collection, Boats for Women, was published in 2019. Widely published in such journals as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide, her honors include the Academy of American Poets Prize and Associated Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Award as well as Pushcart and Best of the Net Award nominations. In March 2020, she co-founded and continues to host Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry, an intergenerational, intersectional, and international Facebook poetry group and reading series. After living for two decades in the Pacific Northwest directing a college writing center, she now lives in her hometown of Old Saybrook, Connecticut.