Sacramento Poetry Center Lecture Series Starting Soon

FEB 16 -- Bolo and Bullshit: The Other TS Eliot.

Josh McKinney is the author of two award-winning books of poetry: Saunter, co-winner of the University of Georgia Press Poetry Series Open Competition in 2002, and The Novice Mourner, winner of the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize in 2005. He has also published two poetry chapbooks: Saunter (Primitive Publications, 1998) and Permutations of the Gallery (Pavement Saw Press, 1996), winner of the Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest. His poems have appeared in over one hundred national journals such as American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, The Kenyon Review, New American Writing, Ploughshares, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and many others. His other awards include The Dickinson Poetry Prize and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Writing. He is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Joshua is currently a professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, where he teaches courses in literature and various creative writing courses such as Between Genres: Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction, Meter & Rhythm: The Poem’s Heartbeat, and Ecopoetics.


FEB 23 -- Poetry Collaboration

V.S. Chochezi is a poet, spoken word artist, and long time student of West African dance and drum. She teaches at Sierra College and with her mother, Staajabu, entertains audiences with her poetry slam team, Straight Out Scribes. Her other experience is as a leadership development and MBTI practioner, mother, daughter, grandmother, mother-in-law, artist, and activist.


MARCH 1 -- Women Poets: Friendship, Critique & Support

Molly Fisk was born in San Francisco. She earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College/ Harvard University, her M.B.A. from Simmons College Graduate School of Management, and began writing at the age of 35. She's the author of The More Difficult Beauty (Hip Pocket Press, 2010), Listening to Winter (Roundhouse Press/Heyday Books, 2000), Terrain (with Dan Bellm and Forrest Hamer, Hip Pocket Press, 1998), the letterpress chapbook Salt Water Poems (Jungle Garden Press, 1994) and two CDs of radio commentary: Blow-Drying a Chicken, and Using Your Turn Signal Promotes World Peace. (See Books/CDs) Molly has received fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts the California Arts Council and the Marin Arts Council. She's won the Dogwood Prize, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize in Poetry, the Billee Murray Denny Prize, the National Writer's Union Prize and a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. She serves as Poet Laureate of radio station KVMR-FM, Nevada City and recently appeared in the TEDxSanFrancisco event The Edge of What We Know.

MARCH 8 -- Contemporary Poetry: The International Poetry Web

Emmanuel Sigauke was born in Zimbabwe, where he started writing at the age of thirteen. After graduating from the University of Zimbabwe with a BA in English, he moved to California, where he completed graduate studies. He teaches English at Cosumnes River College in Sacramento, where he is an editor for the Cosumnes River Journal. Sigauke hosts readings at SPC and writes book reviews for Poetry Now. He is the publisher of Munyori Literary Review and has published many of his poems in journals and anthologies. Professor Sigauke has facilitated poetry workshops in Natomas for the public. The author has a published collection of poems titled, Forever Let Me Go.


MARCH 15 -- The Blab of the Pave: Rhythm, Texture, Silence and Other Elements of Post-ryhming Poetry

Poet Laureate of Sacramento Bob Stanley serves as the president of the Sacramento Poetry Center as well as teaches Creative Writing and English at CSU Sacramento. His poems have won a number of awards, including the California Focus on Writers prize in 2006 and have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. He recently published his first chapbook, Walt Whitman Orders a Cheeseburger, released by Rattlesnake Press in 2009.

Also with special guest lecturer, John Allan Cann, one of Sacramento’s finest poetry scholars. He studied at Cornell with A.R. Ammons. John wrote and published a number of books in the 1970s, and he has recently become more involved in the Sacramento poetry scene. He currently teaches English Composition at Cosumnes River College, and is also offering a class on American poets born in the 1930s, at the Room to Write School of Poetry on 25th Street.


MARCH 22 -- Japanese Literary Traditions in West Coast Poetics

Judy Halebsky won a New Issues Prize for her book, Sky=Empty, and was a finalist for the California Book Award. Her chapbook, Space Gap Interval Distance is forthcoming from Sixteen Rivers Press. The MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, and the Japanese Ministry of Culture have supported her work. With a collective of Tokyo poets, she edits and translates the bilingual poetry journal Eki Mae. She Originally from Nova Scotia, she now lives in San Francisco and teaches at Dominican University of California. Books: Sky=Empty (New Issues Press, 2010) Chapbooks: Space, Gap, Interval, Distance (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2012), Japanese for Daydreamers (Finishing Line Press, 2008); Anthologies: Yuba Flows (Hip Pocket Press, 2007); Journals: Eleven Eleven, Five Fingers Review, Harpur Palate, Hotel Amerika, New Delta Review, Ping Pong, Poetry Kanto, Poetry Now, Runes: A Review of Poetry, Smartish Pace, and more. Prizes: New Issues Poetry Prize, Sixteen Rivers Press Chapbook Award for Poets Under Forty


MARCH 29 -- Kenneth Rexroth: The World Outside the Window

James DenBoer is publisher of Swan Scythe Press. Long appreciated by local readers of poetry, James DenBoer’s work has appeared in a great variety of publications in multiple media. DenBoer has authored eight books of poetry spanning almost 40 years, has appeared in another seven anthologies of poetry and literature, and has won awards and grants from the National Council on the Arts, the Author’s League of America, the Carnegie Fund for Authors and the National Endowment for the Arts. Great and recognizable poets have celebrated the poetry of James DenBoer. National Book Award winner William Stafford said that DenBoer’s “readers are immediately enriched by the various dimensions that an original and assured mind can give to the texture of real life in our time.” Pulitzer Prize winner and former Poet Laureate William Meredith wrote that DenBoer’s poetry “reveals a growth in humor, in tough-mindedness, and in affection for the natural world.” And David Wagoner, former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, has said “”The voice of James DenBoer . . . seems lucid, flexible, refreshing, and important.” DenBoer’s most recent book, Stonework: Selected Poems, was published by Sandra McPherson’s Swan Scythe Press, in the city of Davis.
James Denboer performed on March 19th, 2008. DenBoer has written: Learning The Way, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969 (U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum) Trying To Come Apart, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971 (National Council of the Arts award), Nine Poems, Christopher's Books, Santa Barbara, 1972, Brandi & Brandts & DenBoer & Durand & Peters & Turner, Christopher's Books, 1973, Lost in Blue Canyon, Christopher's Books, Santa Barbara, 1981, Dreaming of the Chinese Army, Blue Thunder Press, 2000, Poems: James DenBoer, Verdant Press, Pasadena CA (artist book), 2002, Poems: James DenBoer/Paintings: Mel Smothers, The Press of the Black Dog, Sacramento, CA, 2002 (1 copy of handmade book with original paintings), Poems: James DenBoer, Magpie Press Books, Sacramento, CA (artist book), 2002, Bibliography of the Published Work of Douglas Blazek 1961-2001, Glass Eye Books, 2003, Back Until Then, Verdant Press, Berkeley, CA, 2005; prose poems, Black Dog: An Incomplete Seque Between Two Seasons, Rattlesnake Press, Fair Oak, CA, 2005


APRIL 5 -- Surrealism and it's Academic Discontents

Tim Kahl is the author of the poetry collection, Possessing Yourself (Word Tech Press, 2009), and his poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Letters and Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, and numerous other journals. He has also translated, among others, the work of German poet Rolf Haufs, Brazilian poets Ledo Ivo and Marly de Oliveira, and the poems of Jose Saramago, the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate. He currently serves the poetry community as the editor for Bald Trickster Press and as the Vice President of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He teaches at Sacramento City College.