Hello friends,
I’m happy to have 3 poems (Praisesong for Sisters, Leftover & For the Girl Who Nearly Broke Me) up in the Gender issue of Poemeleon: http://www.poemeleon.org/ching-in-chen-2/
I’m also happy to be reading Wednesday night (Oct. 14) in the Poemeleon reading at the Sweeney Art Gallery in downtown Riverside with a great line-up of local poets & to be headed North to San Francisco as part of Litquake’s Litcrawl. Info for both below — Hope to see you there if you’re able!
And as my parting thought, I’ve been reflecting a lot on seasons and transition. I went back to Massachusetts this past weekend (to a glorious red, orange and yellow fall!) to participate in the Boston Asian American Students Intercollegiate Conference — thinking back to when I was a 16 year old kid who somehow made it to to that 1st Conference for Asian Pacific American Youth & what a path it has led me down. How each day we’re finding our place in the world & where we fit in. Thank you.
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POETRY AT THE SWEENEY
Wednesday 10/14, 7-9pm
UCR Sweeney Art Gallery, 3800 Main St, Riverside
Please join Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and The Inlandia Institute for an evening of readings, book signings, and refreshments.
In celebration of the launch of Poemeleon’s fourth year in publication and the announcement of the inaugural Inlandia Literary Laureate Award, Poemeleon & Inlandia have teamed up to bring you a stellar lineup of authors. During the reading we will be going over procedures for nominating your favorite author for Inlandia’s Literary Laureate Award, the first of its kind in the Inland Empire, which will, through its nominations process, recognize one regionally-based author for their contribution to the region’s rich and distinctive literary heritage.
Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry was founded by Cati Porter in December 2005 and is published twice per year, April & October. Each issue includes poems, interviews, book reviews, and essays, and is devoted to a particular kind of poetry — poems on place, ekphrastic poems, poems in form, the prose poem, the persona poem, and humorous poems, with an issue devoted to gender launching October 1st followed in the spring by an issue devoted to collaborative works. Poemeleon nominates for prize anthologies such as the Pushcart, Best of the Web, Best of the Net, and Meridian’s Best New Poets anthology, for which work has been selected, in addition to running an annual reading series and an ongoing contest series on its website titled The Mystery Box. To learn more about Poemeleon please visit http://www.poemeleon.org.
The Inlandia Institute is a literary center in partnership with Heyday Books and its Affiliates that seeks to bring focus to the richness of the literary enterprise that exists in the Inland Empire. Inlandia’s mission is to recognize, support and expand literary activity in all of its forms through community programs in the Inland Empire, thereby deepening people’s awareness, understanding, and appreciation of this unique, complex and creatively vibrant region. With publishing partner Heyday Books, Inlandia supports the publication of quality regional literary projects under a special Inlandia imprint. Inlandia also operates a program producing and supporting public literary programming throughout the Inland Empire, conducts oral histories to preserve the history and culture of the Inland Empire, holds writer’s workshops for emerging authors, creates a love of literature in children; and mentors young writers and cultural activists. To learn more about Inlandia please visit http://www.inlandiainstitute.org.
Authors to be present during this event:
Poemeleon associate editor MAUREEN ALSOP, Ph.D., is the author of two full collections of poetry, Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag) and The Diction of Moths (Ghost Road Press, pending). She is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press), the dream and the dream you spoke (Spire Press), 12 Greatest Hits (Pudding House) and Nightingale Habit (Finishing Line Press). She is the winner of Harpur Palate’s Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals including Blackbird, New Delta Review, Tampa Review, Typo, 42 Opus, Drunken Boat, Copper Nickel, and Front Porch Journal.
JO SCOTT-COE’s work has appeared in many publications, most recentlyHotel Amerika, turnrow, Green Mountains Review, River Teeth, Memoir(and), Ruminate,and the anthology (Re)Interpretations: The Shapes of Justice in Women’s Experience(Cambridge Scholars Press). Her interviews with essayist Richard Rodriguez and poet Donna Hilbert have been featured inNarrativeandChiron Review, respectively, and she received a Pushcart Special Mention in nonfiction for 2009. In November 2009, Scott-Coe will present research on gender and violence in education at the National Women’s Studies Association “Difficult Dialogues” conference in Atlanta.She now works as a new assistant professor of English composition and creative writing at Riverside Community College in Southern California.
CHING-IN CHEN is the author of The Heart’s Traffic and a multi-genre, border-crossing writer. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, she is a Kundiman, Macondo and Lambda Fellow. A community organizer, she has worked in the Asian American communities of San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston. Her work has been recently published in BorderSenses, Rio Grande Review, Chroma, Sous Rature, Cha, Verdad and others.
Poemeleon associate editor,JUDY KRONENFELD, Ph.D., is the author of two books and two chapbooks of poetry, the most recent being Light Lowering in Diminished Sevenths, winner of the 2007 Litchfield Review Poetry Book Prize, which was published in Summer, 2008. Her poems, as well as the occasional short story and personal essay have appeared in numerous print and online journals. Recent and forthcoming poem credits include Natural Bridge, The American Poetry Journal, The Innisfree Poetry Journal, Calyx, The Hiram Poetry Review, The Pedestal, The Cimarron Review, as well as a number of anthologies, including Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, edited by Christopher Buckley and Gary Young (Greenhouse Review Press/Alcatraz Editions, 2008) and Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease, edited by Holly Hughes (forthcoming from Kent State University Press). She is also the author of a critical study: KING LEAR and the Naked Truth (Duke U.P., 1998). She is lecturer emeritus in the Department of Creative Writing, at the University of California, Riverside.
ROBERT KRUT is the author of The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). His work has appeared in Blackbird, Barrow Street, and The Mid-American Review, among others. He teaches in the writing program at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
FRANCES RUHLEN MCCONNEL is the author The Direction of Longing (Bellowing Ark Press), white birches, black water, (Bucket of Type Printery) and ispresently putting together a collectiontentatively called Rising is the Same as Falling while also working on a novel. Recently four of her haiku were published in the 2009 Southern California haiku anthology Shell Gathering. Along with Claremont poet Lucia Galloway, who has a Mystery Box poem in the current issue Poemeleon, she chairs the steering committee of the Claremont Library Poetry series, sponsored by the Friends of the Claremont Library on whose board she now serves. She has just begun leading a writing group at the Pilgrim Place retirement community in Claremont.
RUTH NOLAN is a poet/writer/editor based in Palm Desert, CA, where she is Associate Professor of English at College of the Desert. Her poetry has appeared in Pacific Review, Mosaic, Women’s Studies Quarterly, San Diego Poetry Annual, Poemeleon, Phantom Seed, and many other literary magazines and anthologies. She is editor of the anthology No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California’s deserts, forthcoming from Heyday Books in late 2009. She was the recipient of a 2008-09 Joshua Tree National Park writer’s residency, and has published two collections of poetry, Dry Waterfall (2008) and Wild Wash Road (1996.)
STEPHANY PRODROMIDES has poems in or forthcoming in Drunken Boat, The Laurel Review, sou’wester, Red Rock Review, Barn Owl Review, New CollAge and CRATE, and her chapbook manuscript Fishnet was a finalist for the 2008 Center for Book Arts and DIAGRAM competitions. Her book reviews have appeared in Poetry International. She designs corporate training, and co-hosts The Third Area and the Redondo Poets readings in Los Angeles.
HILDA WEISS has been published recently in Salamander, Nerve Cowboy, Ekphrasis and Pacific Coast Journal. Her work is forthcoming in the Tar Wolf Review and Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. She invites you to visit www.poetry.la, a website featuring videos from Southern California open mic venues, which she recently co-founded. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she is a fourth generation Californian and lives and writes in Santa Monica.
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LITQUAKE LITCRAWL (PHASE 2)
EAST MEETS WEST: Faculty and Friends of the Writing and Consciousness MFA
Program at California Institute of Integral Studies
7:15-8:15 p.m.
Her Majesty’s Secret Beekeeper, 3520 20th between Valencia & Mission.
Randall Babtkis is the author of Bannister. He is working on a volume of 250 poems and a hyperfiction collection called The Originals.
Ching-In Chen is a multi-genre, border-crossing writer. Her debut collection, The Heart’s Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press), chronicles the life of Xiaomei, an immigrant girl.
Stephen Kessler’s latest books include Burning Daylight (poems) and Luis Cernuda’s Desolation of the Chimera (translation). He is the editor of The Redwood Coast Review.
Genny Lim, a native San Franciscan poet-performer-playwright, is the author of Winter Place and Child of War. She co-authored ISLAND: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island.
Sarah Stone (www.redroom.com/author/sarah-stone) teaches in the MFA in Writing and Consciousness at California Institute of Integral Studies and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
For the full schedule, see the Litquake website here: http://www.litquake.org/category/schedule/
