Sholeh Wolpé and Adela Najarro


 
Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at 7:30 PM,

 Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Avenue, Santa Cruz

Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, playwright and literary translator whose work, according to Terrain Journal, “transcends the boundaries of language, gender, ethnicity and nationality.” Born in Iran, she spent most of her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. Wolpé has authored three collections of poetry, most recently Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths. She is the editor of two anthologies, Breaking the Jaws of Silence, which gathers American voices of protest, and The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and Its Exiles. Her books of translations include, Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad and a Persian translation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (co-translated with Mohsen Emadi), commissioned by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in celebration of Whitman’s work. Her latest book, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, will be released by W. W. Norton in 2017. Wolpé’s accolades include the 2014 Pen/Heim award, 2013 Midwest Book Award, 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize and residency awards at Hedgebrook in Whidbey Island, and Château de Lavigny in Switzerland.

Adela Najarro is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Split Geography (Mouthfeel Press) and Twice Told Over (Unsolicited Press), both published in March 2015. David A. Sullivan notes that in Split Geography “the personality that emerges from this collection is funny, poignant, irascible, and above all, in love with the promise that writing can be a spiritual exercise to remake ourselves. These are poems to live among. “About Twice Told Over, ”Juan Felipe Herrera states, “A tour de force, magnificent, lovely, sculpted, drenched with Borges, Sexton, Najarro. A radically new Latina verse.” She currently lives in Santa Cruz and teaches creative writing, literature and composition at Cabrillo College. 

Cosponsored by Poetry Santa Cruz and A New Cadence Poetry Series

A New Cadence Poetry Series

Presents

Roy Mash

and

Gerald Fleming

Reading from their works

@

The Felix Kulpa Gallery

107 Elm Street

Santa Cruz, CA 95060

May 26^th, 2015

Reception at 6:30pm

Reading begins at 7:30pm

Hosted By Robert Sward

Free

Roy Mash is a long time board member of Marin Poetry Center. He holds degrees in English, Philosophy, and Computer Science, though he currently doodles his time away staring out of café windows, dabbing up the seeds that have fallen from an everything bagel, and mentally thumbing over his poems that have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Barrow Street, Nimrod, Poetry East, and River Styx. He is the recipient of the Atlanta Review International Publication Award, and the Grand Prize Winner of the 2015 Poets’ Dinner competition. His first full length book, Buyer’s Remorse (Cherry Grove Collections), debuted in 2014.

"Buyer’s Remorse is a celebration of the small, the overlooked, the underrated. Doggedly anti-lofty, reveling in the This-Worldly, the poems caper around the themes of the body, of mathematics and rationality, adolescence and middle-age, love and fear and death. The tone ranges from the irreverent to the wistful – the spritz of seltzer in the face of the Creature from the Black Lagoon to the lover standing in one sock. Drawing on sources from The Three Stooges to Archimedes, Lavoisier to Tweety Bird, Mash is a latter day Anti-Oracle, a nail in the tire of post-modernity, an incorrigible wag who’s smuggled his pea shooter into the Church of Poetry. Be ready to duck."

Gerald Fleming’s most recent books are The Choreographer, longer prose poems (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco) and Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems from Hanging Loose Press in New York. He’s written three books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). His poetry has appeared in many magazines over the decades, including New Letters, Western Humanities Review, Carolina Quarterly, New World Writing, Hanging Loose, and many others. Between 1995 and 2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, and currently edits the limited-edition vitreous magazine One (More) Glass. He taught in the San Francisco Public Schools for thirty-seven years, and lives most of the year in Northern California, part of the year in Paris.

 

Of Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing, Gary Young said:

“These dark fables, written in a language ‘born of rage,’ furiously peel back the veneer of the world we think we know. Part fairy tale, part dream, these poems explore a region where the ordinary and the fantastic overlap, where a smile can get a job, and where identities are fluid and interchangeable... Many poems are set in exotic locations—Corfu, Bali, Mexico, Ukraine—but they all merge to create a discrete, elemental landscape, a poetic geography where this remarkable collection plays out. In one poem, ‘a boy and a girl court each other by telling ghost stories.’ Gerald Fleming’s Night of Pure Breathing is a collection that seduces the reader in just that way. Hold onto your socks; you’re in for a ride.” 

Co-sponsored with Poetry Santa Cruz