This Saturday, April 15th, 9 am - 6:30 pm, in the Center for the Arts in Grass Valley, CA, you have the opportunity to participate in open mic, readings, and workshops with other artists!
There are two poets in particular I'm looking forward to hearing at the festival. Lee Herrick will open with an un-keynote talk called (Be)longing: On Poetry, Loss, and the Joyful Reclamation of Proximity. Lee Herrick was recently selected as the tenth Poet Laureate of California; he is the first Asian American to serve in the role. He was born in Daejeon, South Korea, adopted at ten months of age, and grew up in Modesto. He served as Poet Laureate of the City of Fresno from 2015 to 2017. He co-founded Fresno’s LitHop, an all-day literary festival.
I love generative workshops, and one of my favorite poets is leading an afternoon one. Dorianne Laux’s most recent collection, a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, is Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems. Her other books include What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award; and The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.She is founding faculty at Pacific University in Oregon, a professor of creative writing at North Carolina State University, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
One of the past presentations that really blew off the top of my head was an interview with a Ukrainian clown artist and a Russian dance artist and their film collaboration. This year, the festival hosts a conversation discussing Agency, Sovereignty and Self-determinatioSierra Poetry Festivaln in Poetry, power dynamics between poetry and readership, and themes of possession, ownership and belonging. Mark Treddenick will speak with Aboriginal poet Judith Nangala Crispin live from Australia
I will have a table in the Poetry Place fair representing Tangled Roots Writing. If you go to the festival, please stop by to say hi! or call my cell to connect.
