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Dorianne Laux’s fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon (W.W. Norton), is the recipient of the Oregon Book Award.  It was also short-listed for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States in the previous year, and chosen by the Kansas City Star as one of the ten best books of poetry published in 2005.  Laux is author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions, Awake (1990) introduced by Philip Levine, to be reprinted this year by Eastern Washington University Press, What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke, (2000).  She is co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Her work has appeared in the Best of the American Poetry Review, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and has been twice included in Best American Poetry.  She has been awarded with a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  She waited tables and wrote poems in San Diego, L.A., Berkeley, Petaluma and Juneau, Alaska before moving to Eugene where she’s now a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.  She lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar.

Read a Dorianne Laux poem on Verse Daily.

Visit Dorianne Laux’s blog on MySpace.

Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press.  Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa says “There’s a tenderness at the core of Fortune, where the commonplace becomes atypical and fantastical, and each poem possesses a voice that summons and reveals.  Joseph Millar is a poet we can believe.”  Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman.  His first collection, Overtime (2001) was finalist for the Oregon Book Award and his poems have appeared in numerous magazines including TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, New Letters, Manoa, and River Styx.  He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, Montalvo Arts Center and from Oregon Literary Arts.  Millar teaches at Oregon State University, The University of Oregon, and Pacific University’s Low Residency Program.

Read about Fortune on the Eastern Washington University Press website.

Ellen Bass’s fourth book of poems, The Human Line, was published by Copper Canyon Press in June 2007.  She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the groundbreaking No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women (Doubleday, 1973), has published several volumes of poetry, including Mules of Love (BOA, 2002) which won the Lambda Literary Award.  Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Field.  She was awarded the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and a Fellowship from the California Arts Council.  She is also co-author of Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins 1996) and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (Harper Collins 1988, 1994), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into ten languages.  She teaches in Santa Cruz, Mallorca, Tuscany, and at Pacific University’s MFA Program in Oregon. 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.
 

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.