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

Ellen Bass has a new book of poetry, The Human Line, published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2007.  Her previous book, Mules of Love (BOA 2002) won the Lambda Literary Award.  Her work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, Ms., Ploughshares, Field, and The Kenyon Review.  In 1973, she co-edited the groundbreaking book, No More Masks!, the first major anthology of women’s poetry.  She has also written best-selling non-fiction, including The Courage to Heal.  Among her awards for poetry are The Pushcart Prize, the The Pablo Neruda Prize and the New Letters Prize.  Ellen has been supporting and inspiring writers for over thirty years.  She teaches poetry and creative writing in Santa Cruz, Big Sur, British Columbia, Mallorca, and Tuscany.  Her website is www.ellenbass.com/.

Read about The Human Line in the Copper Canyon Press website, including a brief book description, links to reviews and three poems.

Phyllis Koestenbaum is the author of eight poetry books, most recently Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies, a collection of prose poems.  Her book, Criminal Sonnets, was nominated for a Bay Area Book Award (BABRA).  Selections from her first published book, oh I can't she says (1980), appeared in In Pieces, an anthology of fragmentary writing (Impassio Press).  Koestenbaum’s prose poems have been published in two volumes of The Best American Poetry, Epoch, American Letters & Commentary, Michigan Quarterly Review, Verse, Prairie Schooner, Witness, Sentence, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming from Court Green.  Her essay on her writer’s block of more than two decades, “The Secret Climate the Year I Stopped Writing,” is forthcoming from The Massachusetts Review.  Koestenbaum’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Santa Clara County Arts Council, a Senior Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Diane Wood Middlebrook Fellowship at the Djerassi Foundation, where she has been in residence three times.  She has taught in Continuing Studies at Stanford University and currently teaches poetry workshops and individual writers.  Koestenbaum is a senior scholar at the Michelle Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.

Read “On Becoming and Not Becoming a Poet: A Conversation with Phyllis Koestenbaum,” an interview by Cate Gable.

Read the prose poem “Selfish” from Her Face in the Mirror by Kaye Moskowitz.
 

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

Poetry Santa Cruz 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 Café, 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.