Poets & Writers Blogs

Reginald Dwayne Betts's Sunday Afternoon

Washington, D.C.-based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about participating in the P&W-supported reading at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. in April 2010.

Kim Roberts's anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C., brought D.C. poets together at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. on a sunny April Sunday in 2010. 

As soon as I arrived, I began reading a poem for Mississippi Avenue. The poem is about a couple of kids I once knew. They would play what we use to call throwback. Throwback is a game in which players would toss a football (or any ball) into a crowd of people, and then begin chasing the person who caught it. If the ball is memory, then the boys doing the chasing are hungry to remember. Full Moon on K Street is a little like that: memories we toss into crowds, then chase down. 

Just as good as the reading was Roberts's welcome. She relived the history of the project and the tidbits of D.C. history that can be found within the book as an accompaniment to the poems. Full Moon on K Street is history and poetry. Truth is, Roberts's anthology is about making memories live in the present...that’s what the reading was about too.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

National Book Awards Add Book App to Nominees

The National Book Awards, a literary institution for more than sixty years, broke through their traditional submission guidelines recently, accepting for the first time an exclusively electronic book as a nominee. According to National Book Foundation (NBF) executive director Harold Augenbraum, although the rules stipulate that eligible books must be printable on paper—and the app in question, designed for the iPad, contains features such as graphics and video—the foundation reviews its guidelines annually, and broadening them to include e-books may be a natural next step.

"I wonder whether the tablet reader will lend itself to a new phase in the type of literary abstraction," Augenbraum told book culture website inReads, noting that the nominated app "combines text, graphics, and video in a seamless story. That will have an effect on the way we read. There will be people who will only want to read text, or watch video, and then there will be combinations."

Among the other books nominated for this year's awards are 191 poetry collections, 311 novels, and 441 nonfiction books.

For more of Augenbraum's behind-the-scenes perspective on the National Book Awards, check out the full interview at inReads. And stay tuned this fall as the NBF whittles down its list of nominees; the finalists for the ten-thousand-dollar prizes will be announced on October 12.

Francisco Bustos's Guest Writers Series

Located in Chula Vista, California, Southwestern College (SWC) hosts a Guest Writers Series. Francisco Bustos, poet, musician, member of the spoken word/music collective Frontera Drum Fusion, and professor of English composition at SWC blogs about the P&W-supported reading series.

Every month SWC invites California-based writers to share their work. We have one bilingual reading and several Spanish language readings each semester. Many writers hail from San Diego County as well as the border cities of Tijuana, Baja, and California, Mexico. Being so close to the U.S.-Mexico border gives us a unique environment, rich in culture and aesthetic diversity. Our invited writers read in various styles, from English to Spanish and from Spanish to Spanglish (a mix of Spanish and English). It is not uncommon to hear audience members switch between languages in the middle of a conversation with a writer. 

On occasion, I participate as a poet/musician in literary and cultural events on both sides of the border. This gives me opportunities to network with writers from North County, San Diego, (the U.S. side of the border) as well as writers from Mexicali (the Mexican side of the border). Because of festivals like the Tijuana Book Fair and other festivals sponsored by the Tijuana Cultural Center, I also get to meet (and subsequently invite) writers who live far from our border region. We've had writers from as far as Mexico City!

This fall we are working on a reading that will involve Uberto Stabile, Spanish editor of the poetry anthology "Tan Lejos de Dios/So Far From God," a compilation of poetry from the Mexican side of the border region. Stabile will be presenting his book across the Mexican border region this November—hopefully, if all works out, with a pit stop at our very own SWC Guest Writer Series.

Photo:  Francisco Busto.  Credit: Gerardo Navarro.

Major support for Readings and Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation.  Additional support comes fromt the Friends of Poets & Writers.

PSA Chapbook Fellowships Go to Two Kundiman Poets

The winners of this year's Poetry Society of America (PSA) Chapbook Fellowships were announced this week, with two out of the four winning poets having honed their craft with Asian American poetry collective Kundiman. The two New York Fellowships, given to writers under thirty who live in the five boroughs of New York City and have not published a book, were awarded to Alison Roh Park for What We Push Against, selected by Joy Harjo, and Angela Veronica Wong for Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter, selected by Bob Hicok.

When the announcement of the winners was made, according to Kundiman cofounder and poet Joseph O. Legaspi, the joy was palpable on the Kundiman listserv, populated by student writers, known as "fellows," and mentors who have served on the faculty of the organization's annual summer retreat. "Both winners accepted the accolades with sincere appreciation and their usual grace," Legaspi says. "They also expressed that they are carrying on the torch ignited by Hossannah Asuncion, another Kundiman fellow, who won a 2010 PSA National Chapbook Fellowship for Fragments of Loss. I love how this chosen family empowers each other."

"Over the years Kundiman has built a strong community of Asian American poets," Legaspi adds. "As for the winners, they are aesthetically very different, but they comprise the complexities of voices of the Asian American diaspora. Ultimately, the PSA Chapbook Fellowships help create a wider audience for Asian American poetry."

The national awards, which are awarded to writers of any age and from anywhere in the country who have not had a book published, went to E. J. García of Cambridge, Massachusetts, for Your bright hand, selected by Gerald Stern, and Marni Ludwig of Saint Louis for Little Box of Cotton and Lightning, selected by Susan Howe. The four winners, all of whom are women poets, will see their chapbooks published next year and will each receive one thousand dollars.

In the video below, Wong reads at a Lantern Review event held in conjunction with this year's Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference.

Flannery O'Connor Award Goes to East Coast Writers

The winners of the 2011 Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award have been announced. The publication prize, which has bolstered authors such as Ha Jin and Antonya Nelson early in their careers, was awarded to E. J. Levy of Washington, D.C., and Hugh Sheehy of New York City. Each will receive one thousand dollars, and the University of Georgia Press will publish their books in the fall of 2012.

Levy, whose stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Times, and the Nation, among other publications, won for her collection, My Life in Theory. She is also the editor of Lambda Award–winning anthology Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers (Harper Perennial, 1995).

Sheehy won for The Invisibles, which series editor Nancy Zafris described as a collection of “eerie tales extraordinarily narrated.” The title story from his winning manuscript appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2008, edited by George Pelecanos.

Along with Zafris, authors M. M. M. Hayes, Bruce Machart, Kirsten Ogden, and Lori Ostlund served as judges. The competition will accept submissions for the next O'Connor competition from April 1 to May 31, 2012.

In the video below, past winner Antonya Nelsonwho received the O'Connor Award in 1989 for what became her debut collection, The Expendables—discusses the story behind her stories.

Reginald Dwayne Betts Makes Marks

Poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about Washington, D.C.-based writers who are making marks.

"Flat Langston" made quite an uproar last year during the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference. For those who are unaware, there was once a cardboard cutout of Langston Hughes at the Busboys and Poets 14th Street location. It was there before poet, photographer, go-go aficionado, and D.C. native Thomas Sayers Ellis relieved it of its duties. The uproar isn’t as important now, forgotten as most things are forgotten.

All that to say, I love listening to stories of the District's past—about spots along the U Street corridor that once housed poetry, about Toni Asante Lightfoot’s legendary reading series, and nights when Holly Bass, Kenneth Carroll, Brian Gilmore, Brandon Johnson, Ernesto Mercer, Joel Dias-Porter, and others could be found with a sheaf of poems in hand burning the night sky. I dig those stories. I dig, too, that nostalgia is the curse that ruins us. While we celebrate the folks who have made marks on the cultural scene of the District, it seems much too easy to forget about the folks who are making marks right now.

Alan King and Derrick Weston Brown, for instance, have both been putting in work as poets and workshop leaders around the city, working with the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop at Hart Middle School and Ballou High School, respectively. Fred Joiner, a jack of all trades,  along with Jon West-Bey, Executive Director of the American Poetry Museum, engineered a cultural exchange with Belfast. Add to that Kyle Dargan,  assistant professor of creative writing at American University and editor of Post No Ills. Add still Simone Jackson of Sulu DC, Silvana Straw of DC Writer’s Corp and the Marpat Foundation. More? Melanie Henderson, forth generation D.C. native and winner of the Main Street Rag prize for her lovely collection of poems, Elegies for New York Avenue.

Still want more? Kim Roberts holds it down. Sarah Browning does her thing. So does Melissa Tuckey. Sandra Beasley. All of whom are wonderful, wonderful writers. Maybe this isn't a renaissance, but it damn sure isn't a drought.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

SMITH Wants Your Boss, in Brief

Last month, we reported on SMITH magazine's six-word memoir contest Six Words About Work, which launched with the theme My Job (or, "Why I do what I do").

For the next eight days, the magazine is accepting entries on a new topic: bosses—and not just any bosses, but the best bosses ever.

Like inaugural contest winner Mindy Getch, whose My Job memoir, "Who doesn't love the payroll lady," rose above more than four thousand entries, the winner of the boss-themed contest will receive as a prize her choice of an iPad2 or a BlackBerry PlayBook. The prizes are cosponsored by the consulting firm Mercer.

Today's featured memoir comes from Elisa Shevitz: "The CEO knew every intern's name." Other entries, which appear on the SMITH website, include, "Peter Pan complex, together we regress," "Said, 'If he goes, I go,'" and "Verbal pugilist, he's still my dad."

On August 13 the contest will refresh with a new theme. Until then, boss-related entries can be published (with no fee) directly to the contest page.

D.E. Connelly's Haiku Workshop Uncovers Desert Water

From May 19 to June 9, 2011, P&W-supported poet D. E. Connelly, author of the manuscript "A Twisted Balance: One-Line Haiku & a Few Senryu," taught a haiku workshop at the Armory Park Senior Center in Tucson, Arizona. We asked her to say a few words about the experience.

D.E. ConnellyThe poet-sage Matsuo Bashō, born 1644, wrote in memoriam of a friend, “never think of yourself / as someone who did not count— / festival of the souls.” Ueda translated this Japanese haiku into English. The poet-artist Marlene Mountain, born 1939, wrote “white sugar white flour white male”—no translation necessary: It was originally written in U.S. English. Mountain’s haiku reflects the three word-cluster device of classic one-line Japanese haiku as well as its device of image juxtaposition: The first and second word clusters are specific images; the third word cluster, “white male,” is metaphoric, resembling one (including males of color and all females) who, offering no nourishment, choose instead to promote oppressive practices that strip people and things of their inherent value. As Bashō’s tone was of his time and place, Mountain’s is of ours—and each poet agitates the soul: Will I be remembered?  How will I remembered? 

Poets & Writers remembered those of us in the Arizona desert at a time when recognition of each individual’s contribution was being white-washed. With its support and encouragement, the Armory Park Senior Center in Tucson was able to host In The Spirit of Haiku: Three Workshops & A Public Reading. Like water in the desert, sponsorship of a poetry workshop at the Center is wonderful, but rare. 

Workshop One, focusing on the haiku of Bashō (as translated by Sato), reviewed the classic poetic devices compressed within this seemingly simple one-line poem (e.g., two unequal phrases; a strong cutting word between; each phrase with its own specific imagery, which might portray the “what,” “when,” and “where” of the poet’s experience; a seasonal reference—all combined to best convey emotion in a syntax natural to the poet). 

workshop participantsWorkshop Two, focusing on the haiku of Marlene Mountain, explored how the initial haiku in U.S. English (introduced, arguably, in the 1950s) evolved into what is currently promoted in English as a form of ten-to-fourteen syllables. Throughout, but mostly in Workshop Three, attendees shared original work: One participant incorporated calligraphy; another haibun; another read haiku in German, demonstrating how sound patterns, even without sense, can convey emotion.

The public reading gave participants a chance to interact with an audience, which included a few people in their twenties from Tucson Youth Development. One youth was deeply moved by an elder’s seasonal allusion of being in her life’s “December,” with feet on fire from pain as well from an urgency to experience fully and profoundly what remains of her life.

A deep bow to Poets & Writers, the workshop participants, the audience, as well as the Armory Park Senior Center who published the participants’ haiku in its July newsletter.
   
Photos: (Top) D. E. Connelly. Credit: Tom Wuelpern; (bottom) workshop participants. Credit: D. E. Connelly.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Tucson is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Readers' Recommendations Add "Darkly Comic" Novel to Guardian Prize Longlist

Earlier this summer, the Guardian asked book lovers to weigh in on what title was excluded from publishers' entries for the Guardian First Book Award.

While the one hundred thirty six formally submitted titles are still being read and considered, readers' recommendations have helped the prize committee select its first book for the longlist. After "lively debate" and "a fair amount of logrolling," Mexican-born author Juan Pablo Villalobos's novel, Down the Rabbit Hole, translated by Rosalind Harvey, was chosen for the first of ten semifinalist spots.

Villalobos's debut, a look at Latin America's narcotics culture from the perspective of a drug baron's son, was published in England by a new small press, And Other Stories. The indie outfit derives much of its funding from subscribers, who helped launch the press with two translations, Down the Rabbit Hole and Clemens Meyer's All the Lights (translated from the German by Katy Derbyshire), both scheduled for publication next month.

A suggestion by Guardian website commenter Teregarciadiaz was the first to alert the prize committee to Villalobos's book, which appeared last year in Spanish as Fiesta en la madriguera (Anagrama) and has since been translated into seven languages. "Reading this novel in the bloody climate that rains and thunders every day in Mexico is like walking a tightrope," Teregarciadiaz wrote. "Villalobos reminds us that we are vulnerable on the tightrope, but that the strength, imagination, and humor it's spun from hold us up over the abyss of reality and, in spite of atrocity, prevent us from falling."

The Guardian will announce the remaining debut titles longlisted for the ten-thousand-pound prize (worth roughly sixteen thousand dollars) later this month, and the winner will be revealed in the fall.

Kingsolver Honored for Peace Work

The Dayton Literary Peace Prize committee announced today that its first Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award will be given to novelist and nonfiction writer Barbara Kingsolver. The ten-thousand-dollar prize, formerly known as the Lifetime Achievement Award but renamed to honor the late U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, celebrates an author for a body of work that promotes peace and understanding.

Kingsolver is the author of, most recently, The Lacuna (Harper, 2009), a novel examining the relationship between Mexico and the United States. Among her other works are the memoir Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (HarperCollins, 2007), coauthored with her husband and daughter, and the novels The Poisonwood Bible (HarperFlamingo, 1998) and The Bean Trees (Harper and Row, 1988).

The author will receive her award on November 13 at a ceremony in Dayton, Ohio, the site of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. The finalists for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, given annually for a book of fiction and a book of nonfiction, will be revealed later this month, and the winners will be honored alongside Kingsolver.

In the video below, Kingsolver discusses nationhood, news and gossip, and schadenfreude in The Lacuna, which won the 2010 Orange Prize.

Reginald Dwayne Betts's Poetry in Schools

For the month of August, Washington, D.C.–based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom blogs about poetry in D.C. schools, Busboys and Poets, as well as his memory of being P&W-supported.

The Pen/Faulkner Foundation does great things across the district. Not only does the organization bring writers into the classroom, it also purchases a class set of the writer's book for students to read before the writer's visit. I am amazed at the many ways in which teachers and school leaders are able to tap resources and use them to provide students with a literary outlet such as this one.

Another program of note is the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop. For more than a dozen years, and under the guidance of Nancy Schwalb (the organization's founder and current executive/artistic director), the workshop has placed writers-in-residence in classrooms at Hart Middle School, Ballou Senior High School, and Simon Elementary School. The program's drama club also rewrites classic dramas, then presents their adaptations as motion pictures at the end of each school year. It’s not surprising that the workshop is excellent, what is surprising is that it has become a strong component in the academic life of so many students and is a component that lasts beyond the students' elementary, middle, or even high school years. Former students come back each year to volunteer or say hello.

Finally, there is the Folger Shakespeare Library's Poetry in the Schools program. Teri Cross Davis coordinates the program and does a fabulous job of bringing writers into classrooms across the city for four to six week sessions. All of these programs are amazing, but I’ll add this about the Folger program... I was once sent to Dunbar High under their auspices and, ironically, had the pleasure of working with an English teacher whose first year teaching was the same year my mother graduated high school. A program that is able to reach out to young teachers as well as older, more established teachers is one that should definitely be praised.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The Art of the Literary Duel

Melville House Publishing, pioneer of book-trailer appreciation, is offering its entire novella library to the literary filmmaker who can come up with "the most awesome book trailer of all time." The challenge? Create a video that embodies five novellas by major international authors, all titled The Duel.

The independent press has just released the suite of novella reprints, by Giacomo Casanova, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, Heinrich von Kleist, and Alexander Kuprin, as part of its forty-two volume Art of the Novella series (the official publication date for the five is in August, but books are available now from the press). The winner of the trailer competition will receive the entire collection celebrating the "renegade art form" that doesn't often make its way into a stand-alone book, including titles by classic authors such as Jane Austen, Kate Chopin, Gustave Flaubert, Edith Wharton, and, of course, Herman Melville.

Entries, which should first be posted on YouTube, can be created using any media, from crayons to computer-generated imagery, and must be under three minutes. For all the details on how to submit a video (there is no entry fee), as well as descriptions of each version of The Duel, visit the Melville House site.

In the video below, Melville House throws the gauntlet.

First Novels, Indie Presses Make Booker Prize Longlist

The Man Booker Prize panel has announced its 2011 "Booker dozen," the semifinalists for the fifty-thousand-pound novel award (approximately eighty-two thousand dollars). Among the thirteen are four first-time novelists: Yvvette Edwards, whose A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld) was more than twenty years in the making; Stephen Kelman for Pigeon English (Bloomsbury), which emerged from an agency slush pile and made its way into a bidding war; Patrick McGuinness, who has previously published two books of poetry, for The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books); and journalist and memoirist A. D. Miller for Snowdrops (Atlantic Books).

The other longlisted titles are The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape) by thrice-shortlisted author Julian Barnes; On Canaan's Side (Faber and Faber) by Sebastian Barry; Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch (Canongate Books); The Sisters Brothers (Granta Books) by Patrick deWitt; Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail); The Stranger's Child (Picador) by Alan Hollinghurst, who won the Booker in 2004; Far to Go (Headline Review) by Alison Pick; The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press) by Jane Rogers; and Derby Day (Chatto & Windus) by D. J. Taylor.

Members of U.K. publishing's Independent Alliance made a strong showing, with Canongate Books of Edinburgh and London-based Atlantic Books, Faber and Faber, Granta Books, and Serpent's Tail all represented on the longlist. Also flying the indie flag are Sandstone Press in the Scottish Highlands and Seren Books, the first Welsh publisher to have one of its titles considered for the Booker.

The judging panel, chaired by Stella Rimington, former director of British intelligence agency MI5, consists of novelist Susan Hill, journalists Matthew d'Ancona and Gaby Wood, and politician Chris Mullin. It took roughly two hours of "impassioned debate, but without any acrimony and with a great deal of humor," according to Rimington, for panelists to select this year's titles from one hundred thirty-eight under consideration.

The Booker shortlist will be announced on September 6, and the winner will be named on October 18. The annual award, considered one of the most prestigious for literature in English, is given to a citizen of the British Commonwealth, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

The video below is a trailer for Kelman's Pigeon English. For further visual access to the semifinalists' works, the Guardian has the longlist in pictures.

University of Wisconsin Professor Wins for Year's Worst Sentence

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest announced, for the twenty-ninth year running, the worst sentence submitted to its annual race for the most wretched first line of an imaginary novel.

The writer of this year's worst opener is professor and admitted punster Sue Fondrie, who teaches in the curriculum and instruction program at University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh. She will receive as her prize "a pittance."

Fondrie took top honors for the line—the shortest to win in contest history—"Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories."

The sentence joins a cast of other misfits, run-ons, and purple prose creations in genres such as crime, historical fiction, and romance, as well as a collection of "vile puns," selected for this year's auxiliary honors. The notable lines are posted on the Bulwer-Lytton website.

The contest, established 1982 by English professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University, is named for Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, the author of the familiar opening line "It was a dark and stormy night." Entries are accepted via e-mail throughout the year.

Olga Garcia Remembers Bakersfield

Poet Olga Garcia, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas and the chapbook Lovely Little Creatures, blogs about her experience facilitating a P&W-supported workshop at Southwest Bakersfield Library in Bakersfield, California.

When the California Center for the Book's David Gernand first connected me with Southwest Bakersfield Library to facilitate a memoir writing workshop, I had a sudden flashback.

When I was eight, my parents packed all five of us kids into an old, avocado-green station wagon and drove us to Bakersfield to pick onions. Once there, we toiled in the vicious heat, snapping enormous green scissors, filling coarse brown sacks with dusty white onions. One foreman came by every so often to halfheartedly shoo us kids off the field. Within minutes after he disappeared, we’d run back to our parents to help with the onion picking or the dragging of sacks that inevitably grew heavier with each added onion.

We were supposed to work the fields for several weeks that summer, but at night while we camped out and fought over the bare mattress laid out at the back of the station wagon, we beseeched our parents to take us home. The smell of onions permeated our clothes, skin, and hair. It burned our eyes and lingered on our tongues. After a few days, my father shook his head in defeat, saying we were the worst workers he had ever seen. As we drove out of Bakersfield, we waved goodbye to the onion fields from the rear window, promising never to return.

Thirty-three years later I’m in Bakersfield again, standing before a group of workshop participants at Southwest Library. It’s a small, ethnically diverse group of nine and their ages range from twelve to sixty. Some of them have aspirations of memoir writing; others have come simply to practice writing. I share my onion story as a means to discuss memoir writing (how place, sound, smell, and taste trigger snapshots of what we’ve lived). We do several exercises to probe into the personal stories archived in their bodies.

One exercise asks participants to write about a memorable place. Another asks them to use one of Sandra Cisneros’s vignettes as a springboard to write about their names. Both exercises produce intimate recollections, and it is through the sharing of these intimate recollections that we connect with one another.

Maria, the library branch supervisor, reveals a long-kept secret. “Well, you see,” she says “my name isn’t actually Maria.” The name was given to her by a group of Catholic nuns in the Philippines and it stuck. A great beginning to a memoir. Maritza, from Guadalajara, Mexico, was named after a character in a Brazilian soap opera. And Gene, the middle-aged man whose Mexican parents didn’t speak a word of English, was named after Gene Autry, the American performer known as the "Singing Cowboy." As Gene shares his story, his wife leans into him and mumbles, “I never knew that.”

Photo: Olga Garcia. Credit: Weenobee.com.

Major support for Readings/Workshops events in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.