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PAST FEATURES:
November 18, 2009
William Archila was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, and earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. His poems have been published in The Georgia Review, AGNl, Poetry International, The Los Angeles Review, Notre Dame Review, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily and Portland Review among others. He is a PEN Center USA West Emerging Voices fellow. In his first book, The Art of Exile, Archila asks readers to engage with a subject seldom explored in American poetry: the unrest in El Salvador in the 1980s and its impact on Central American immigrants who now claim this country as home. The Art of Exile is the recent winner of the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center. "A poet of the heart and head, of the personal and public, at times William Archila's poignant poems make me hear and feel an echo of Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo," from the introduction by Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer Prize winner.
Lory Bedikian received her BA from UCLA with an emphasis in Creative Writing, Poetry where she was twice nominated for the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon, where she was awarded the Dan Kimble First Year Teaching Award for Poetry. Her manuscript has been selected several times as a finalist in both the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition and in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award Competition and has received grants from the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial fund as well as from AFFMA: Arpa Film Foundation for Music & Art. Her poems have been published in the Connecticut Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore and Heliotrope among other journals, have been included in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets and are forthcoming in the Portland Review. She currently teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles.
Jamie Asaye FitzGerald was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. She has published poetry in journals Snow Monkey, Ariel, LORE, Speechless the Magazine, Poetic Diversity and Media Cake; and in the anthologies Hunger and Thirst (City Works Press, 2008) and Return from… Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets (tcCreativePress, 2008); and on Seattle’s public buses. She has received an Academy of American Poets College Prize and the Edward G. Moses Poetry Prize from the University of Southern California, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Diego State University. She currently works for Poets & Writers in its Los Angeles office.
Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California. She has taught creative writing, poetry and performance to young people in New York City, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. She has self-published many chapbooks, in addition to being featured in Dark Phrases Magazine and Maganda Magazine. She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio. She recently received the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellowship in 2009, and is working towards her first collection of poems, tentatively titled Ascela at the World's Greatest Fair.
OCTOBER 21, 2009
Charlotte Innes recently published a chapbook Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (Finishing Line Press 2009). Her poetry has also appeared in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2006 (Houghton Mifflin), and various journals including The Hudson Review, The Sewanee Review, The Pinch, The Chaffin Journal, and Knockout. Her awards include Knockout magazine's Inaugural Poetry Award (for a poem that will appear in Knockout's third issue, Fall 2009); the 2007 Chaffin Award for Poetry; and the 2007 Anne Silver Award for Poetry sponsored by Speechless Magazine. She has also written about books and the arts for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times and The Nation. Currently, she is writer-in-residence at Pilgrim School, Los Angeles, where she teaches English and creative writing; assists students in putting out a literary magazine; and runs a visiting writers series.
Cathie Sandstrom's work has appeared in Ploughshares, Runes, Lyric, Solo, Cider Press Review, ART/LIFE, Periphery, New Plains Review and is forthcoming in Presence. Anthologies include Open Windows, Blue Arc West, So Luminous the Wildflowers and Matchbook. Her poem “You Again,” is in the artists’ book collections at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California. Twice a winner in Poetry in the Windows, she was also a winner of the Periphery Prose Poetry contest, first runner-up in the Presence Poetry Contest, runner-up for the dA Gallery and was selected for Newer Poets XIV, sponsored by the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and Beyond Baroque for the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Public Library.
GALA OPENING!! September 16, 2009
Carine Topal, a native New Yorker, writes and teaches in Los Angeles. She moved to Jerusalem, Israel in the 1970's, where she worked with Palestinian merchants, traveling to villages and towns in the West Bank and Bethlehem. She was also employed by the Office of Assimilation, in a small town outside Jerusalem, working with Morrocan Jews. She then lived in Germany on the American army base in Heidelberg. Since 1982, she has anthologized the poetry of special needs children. She participated in the grassroots organization California Poets in the Schools. She was the Poet-in-Residence for the city of Manhattan Beach and Poet-in-Education for Manhattan Beach elementary schools. In 1994, her first collection of poetry, God As Thief, was published by The Amagansett Press. Her work has appeared in Water-Stone, Caliban, The Best of the Prose Poem, Pacific Review, and many other journals throughout the U.S. and Canada. In 2004, she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and in 2005, awarded a residency at Hedgebrook, as well as a fellowship in St. Petersburg, Russia. In 2006, with a grant from Tebot Bach, Carine had the good fortune of teaching poetry at the VA Hospital in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of numerous poetry awards, including the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, the 2007 Robert G. Cohn Prose Poetry Award from California Arts and Letters, with a special edition chapbook, Bed of Want, published by Black Zinnias. Her most recent collection, In the Heaven of Never Before, was published in December, 2008, by Moon Tide Press. Carine was also awarded the 2008 Excellence in Arts Award from the Cultural Arts Commission of Torrance, California.
Larry Colker is a long-time co-host of the weekly Redondo Poets reading at Coffee Cartel in Redondo Beach, CA. His manuscript was selected by Charles Harper Webb as winner of the 2006 California Writers Exchange poetry contest sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc. His work has appeared widely in print and online journals, and in several anthologies of California writers. His chapbooks include At the Curb, Car Waiting, Boy Standing (1997), What the Lizard Knows: New and Selected Poems (2003), Hunger Crossing (2006, with Danielle Grilli), and Girl with Tattooed Heart, Boy Standing (2008). He earns his living as a technical writer, and lives in San Pedro, CA.
Jessica Goodheart’s poetry has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2005, The Antioch Review, Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets, Partisan Review, Spillway, Pearl and other journals. Her work was featured four times in the Poetry in the Windows exhibit, sponsored by the Arroyo Arts Collective in Los Angeles. Her first book, entitled Earthquake Season, is due to be published by Word Press in 2010.
Mary Fitzpatrick's poems have been featured in Atlanta Review, North American Review, and on the Littoral Press website as contest finalists, and in several other journals, most recently Agenda (UK). A poem is forthcoming (December) in The Dos Passos Review and in the Suzanne Lummis anthology, The Poetry Mystique. She is a fourth-generation Angeleno, works as an organizational change manager in a large corporation, and holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
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