
Rebecca Foust
Rebecca Foust and Diane Frank
26 APRIL 2026 — sunday
Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Rebecca Foust, You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems, and Diane Frank, Prayer to the Invisible, Art House Gallery & Cultural Center, 2905 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, two blocks north of Ashby BART, refreshments, free, 3:00 pm (poetryflash.org).
The featured books will be available at the reading and at bookshop.org/shop/poetryflash. This event will be posted on the Poetry Flash YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/channel/UClwdR-uPFNz7XxbBbLcnoEA. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series.
MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Rebecca Foust's new book is You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems. Her previous collection, ONLY, earned a starred review from Publishers Weekly. 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. Foust's most remarkable gift is showing us '…the world as it is: gorgeous in its mortal wound.'" Her other books include Paradise Drive, Press 53 Award-winner and Poetry Society of Virginia Book Award; God Seed (with artist Lorna Stevens), Foreword Book of the Year Award for Poetry; and All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song. She has received the James Dickey Prize, the New Ohio Review Prize, James Hearst Prize, Poetry International Prize, and Pablo Neruda Award. Foust's poems have appeared widely, in The Hudson Review, Iowa Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She is Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, and divides her time between northern California and northern Minnesota.
Diane Frank is a poet and musician. Her new book of poems is Prayer to the Invisible, Thomas Centolella says, ""In her new collection, Diane Frank relies on two of her most beloved motifs: dreams and music. She employs them as talismans against what her mother, a marvelous singer, calls (in my favorite poem) the mishigas—the craziness—of the world. In a touching tribute to her friend who was killed in the Tree of Life shooting, Frank says, 'Our prayers grow out of the shadow / of necessity.' The shadow where, as Jung reminds us, the affirmations of dreams and music and poetry can contend against ever-impending doom." She is the author of nine books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400-mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. She's editor of three anthologies: River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-First Century; Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here; and Pandemic Puzzle Poems. Her first novel, Blackberries in the Dream House, was nominated for the Pulitzer. Diane Frank is editor of Blue Light Press.

