
Richard Tillinghast
Richard Tillinghast, Jeanne Foster, Alan Williamson
19 JUNE 2025 — thursday
Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Richard Tillinghast, Night Train to Memphis, Jeanne Foster, Your Form Became My Own, and Alan Williamson, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems, 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. The featured books 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
Richard Tillinghast's new book of poems is Night Train to Memphis. Roger Rosenblatt says, "Characteristic of Richard Tillinghast's genius, Night Train to Memphis gives us comfort with a beautiful strangeness. 'Imagine what you know,' said Shelley. Richard does just that. He welcomes us to a poem, treats us like kin, then quietly changes our lives for the better." He has published fourteen previous collections, the most recent Blue If Only I Could Tell You, and five works of creative nonfiction including literary travel books on Istanbul, Ireland, and a critical biography of the poet Robert Lowell. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Tennessee.
Jeanne Foster has published four books of poetry, most recently Your Form Became My Own. Rodney Jones says, her "gift is to witness again and again the timeless in a single glimpse." She is a translator from Italian, and co-translated with Alan Williamson, The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, Northern California Book Award-winner for Poetry in Translation. Ascoltando una conchiglia, her selected poems translated into Italian, will be published in Venice this fall. Jeanne Foster is the recipient of the QRL Poetry Award and grants from MacDowell, New York State CAPS, Saint Lawrence, and Lannan Foundation. She is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary's College of California, and is a Unitarian Universalist minister who has spoken in pulpits as wide-ranging as London, New Orleans, and San Francisco.
Alan Williamson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems. Gary Snyder says, "Williamson walks with Psyche, if Psyche were the Muse.…He has a sense for landscape, the Midwestern and Western states—foot-loose, car-loose—an underlying taste for large space or even emptiness.…A world we all know, but said better, with more gentle irony." His previous collections include Franciscan Notes, Love and the Soul, and Res Publica. With Jeanne Foster he co-translated The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, Northern California Book Award-winner for Poetry in Translation. His most recent book of literary criticism is Dante and the Night Journey. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Davis, he continues to teach in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

