At Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz [map]
$3 donation to Poetry Santa Cruz requested.

August Kleinzahler published his first book of poetry, A Calendar of Airs, in 1978.  Since then, he has published six others, including Storm over Hackensack (1985); Earthquake Weather (1989); Red Sauce Whiskey and Snow (1995); and Green Sees Things in Waves (1998).  In 2000, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published Live from the Hong Kong Nile Club: Poems 1975-1990.  His poems have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, Grand Street, The Threepenny Review, and The Paris Review.  A native of Jersey City, Kleinzahler is the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (1989), the Lila Acheson-Reader’s Digest Award for Poetry (1991), and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1996).  In 2000 he was awarded a Berlin Prize Fellowship and in 2004 the Griffin Prize.  His latest book, a collection of meditations entitled Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained, was published in November, 2004 to considerable critical acclaim.  He has also been named poet laureate of his hometown of Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Kleinzahler has been a taxi driver, a locksmith, a logger, and a building manager.  He has taught creative writing courses at Brown University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, as well as to homeless veterans in the Bay Area.  He lives in San Francisco.

Read the poem "Napping After Lunch on the Jacket magazine website.

Read the poem "Ruined Histories".

Read August Kleinzahler's essay on Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, "No Antonin Artaud with the Flapjacks, Please" first published in Poetry, reprinted on the Poetry Daily website.
 

Rebecca Black is the author of Cottonlandia, winner of the 2004 Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts Press.  Raised in Albany, Georgia, she graduated from Newcomb College of Tulane University, and holds an M.F.A. from Indiana University.  A recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Santa Clara University.  She was a Stanford writer-in-residence at the Cité des Arts in Paris during 2004.  Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Conjunctions online, Colorado Review, Bellingham Review, and other journals.

Read and listen to seven poems by Rebecca Black at the Fishouse website.
 

This event is supported by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.

This event is supported, in part, by a grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.

Poetry Santa Cruz receives funding from the the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County.  Some of our readers receive funding from Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from The James Irvine Foundation.  Poetry Santa Cruz is also sponsored by Casablanca Inn, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Capitola Book Cafe, The Attic, National Writers Union Chapter 7, KUSP, the William James Association, the Museum of Art & History, and Cabrillo College.  Membership premiums have been donated by Copper Canyon Press, Graywolf Press, the University of Pittsburgh Press, Coffee House Press, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Robert Sward and Patricia Grube.