K.R Morrison Features 11/4

11/4/19  K.R Morrison  host Elaine

Black & White Photographs by Michelle Kilfeather

When she’s not drumming in two feminist rock bands, K.R. Morrison teaches English Literature and Creative Writing to high school students at Galileo in San Francisco, CA.

Morrison recently featured on Bay Area’s podcast, Storied: San Francisco about being an educator, musician, and writer in a city that’s rapidly changing. She has featured for many curations throughout the Bay Area, most recently Bay Area Generations, Naked Bulb, and Red Light Lit. Apart from reading her poetry at art events in Los Angeles and New Orleans last summer, Morrison featured for curations in New York in June, 2019. Published by Switchback and Quiet Lightning, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal as well as New York’s Gasconade Review selected Morrison as their feature for their most recent publications. She’s currently searching for a publisher for her chapbook, “Cauldrons,” while working on a larger poetry collection entitled, “From Her Wrist.” Once the manuscript is finished, she hopes to have it published by a press that reflects the priorities she voices in her writing.

Grace Grafton Features 10/28

10/28/19 Grace Grafton hosted by Gary

Grace Marie Grafton's most recent book is LENS from Unsolicited Press. It features poems inspired by California artists, 1853-2010. She is the author of six previous collections of poetry. Zero won the 2000 Poetic Matrix Chapbook contest. Visiting Sisters is a collection inspired by the artwork of contemporary women. Other Clues consists of experimental prose poems. A chapbook, Chrysanthemum Oratorio, plays with language and concept. Whimsy, Reticence & Laud, also from Poetic Matrix, explores the sonnet form. Jester, from Hip Pocket Press, features surreal persona poems.

Ms. Grafton taught for many years in the California Poets In The Schools program, for which she was awarded twelve California Arts Council grants. She was named Teacher of the Year by the River Of Words annual student poetry contest co-sponsored by Robert Hass, United States Poet Laureate.

Georgette Howington Feartures 10/21

10/21/2019 Georgette Howington hosted by Bruce

Georgette Howington is a UC Davis California Naturalist of the Mt. Diablo Region.  Her poems are published in Iodine, Sleet, Poeming Pigeons, Sacred Grounds, among others.  Her poems placed at the North American Women’s Music Festival, Ina Coolbrith Poetry Contests and the Benicia Love Poem Contest 2018.  As a horticulturist, her niche is Backyard Habitat and secondary-cavity nesters.  She is a County Coordinator and the Assistant State Program Director for the California Bluebird Recovery Program (www.cbrp.org) and an activist in the conservation community in the SF Bay Area for over 30 years.  Georgette is also a published garden and environmental writer.  

“It Bears Noting the Wolf Moon”

   By Georgette Howington

When the ancient tongue of sage,

wormwood and rosemary drops

below whispers, we can trust them

to tend us.  The dry deep-rooted tangle

of cosmos and sunflowers stretches

the attention offering an unobstructed

view of the blue and vast winter world.

January exhales.

And the Wolf Moon yawns in a white

glow of a frost biting night, while the

garden leaps into the season with a

shiver.  How soft the earth is after

a first rain and how nothing listens

better than a quiet moment when

tendrils of silence leave room for

reverie.

(Sacred Grounds Anthology, 2019)

Sunday, 10/20, at 2pm,Julia Vinogad Book Release Party

Sunday, 10/20, at 2pm,
Zeigeist Press will hold a Julia Vinograd Book Release Party 
at Himalayan Flavors.

Zeitgeist Press is very excited to present two new Julia Vinograd books with a celebration at Himalayan Flavors. Publisher Bruce Isaacson has put together "A Symphony for Broken Instruments", a seminal collection of selected works along with a big section of previously unpublished poems. Never before has such a tour de force of Vinograd’s work been together in one volume, which is 384 pages in total, including art by Deborah Vinograd and Chris Trian. At the same event, editor Deborah Fruchey presents "Our Lady of Telegraph Avenue", the new tribute anthology of poems to, for, and about Julia Vinograd by a slew of friends and local writers.
Please join us for a festive afternoon celebrating the life and work of this remarkable woman who energized and shaped the poetry of the SF Bay Area for over fifty years.
Zeitgeist Press Presents:
Julia Vinograd Release Party – New Book and Tribute Anthology with Bruce Isaacson presenting "A Symphony for Broken Instruments: Selected and New Works by Julia Vinograd" and
Deborah Fruchey presenting the Julia Vinograd tribute anthology "Our Lady of Telegraph Avenue"
with readings from both volumes
Hosted by Bruce Isaacson, event is free of charge (except for restaurant purchases) and books for sale at a one-time discount
ABOUT JULIA VINOGRAD
Julia Vinograd, the popular poet identified with the streets of Berkeley, California, published 70 books during her life (1943-2018). She was raised in Pasadena and Berkeley, where her mother was a poet and English Professor. Her father was announced to win a Nobel Prize in Biochemistry but passed away before the award. Julia earned a B.A. at U.C. Berkeley and an M.F.A. at the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. She won an American Book award from the Before Columbus Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and a “Lifetime Achievement Award as Berkeley’s unofficial Poet Laureate.” She was also famed as the Bubble Lady for her love of blowing soap bubbles for children on Telegraph Avenue. This book represents a life’s work of Street Poems that are accessible, charming, and deeply human.

Lucy Lang Day & Diane Frank Fire & Rain book reading 10/14/19

10/14/19  Lucy Lang Day and Diane Frank hosted by bruce
 Fire & Rain book reading 

Lucille Lang Day’s latest book is Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, an anthology she coedited. She is also the author of ten poetry collections and chapbooks, most recentlyBecoming an Ancestor and Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems; the coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California; and the author of two children’s books, Chain Letter and The Rainbow Zoo, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story. Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, and her many honors include the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature, the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Awards, and nine Pushcart nominations. She is the founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books. http://lucillelangday.com

MUIR WOODS AT NIGHT

Rust-colored ladybugs, clustered like grapes,
mate on horsetails that wave by a creek,
where silvery salmon spawn and leap
when the sandbar breaks at the gate to the sea.

The ladybugs have come hundreds of miles,
from valley to coast, for this singles bash.
The females are choosy:  they twiddle the males,
seeking appendages padded with fat.

And all around—high in redwood burls,
on elk-clover leaves, and in the rich soil—
the meaning of life is to stroke and prod
under a humpbacked moon, dissolving in fog.

From Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018)

Diane Frank is author of seven books of poems, two novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas, Letters from a Sacred Mountain Place (Nirala Publishing, 2018). Her new book of poems, Canon for Bears and Ponderosa Pines, was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2018.Blackberries in the Dream House, her first novel, won the Chelson Award for Fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.  Diane lives in SanFrancisco, where she dances, plays cello in the Golden Gate Symphony, and creates her life as an art form. She teaches at San Francisco State University and Dominican University.  www.dianefrank.net

A poem from Fire and Rain:

            In the Mendocino Woodlands

He walks into the forest
where trees are burning
finding his path in the silence.

Woodpecker, memory, larkspur
in the night of burning.

His eyes ask me to wait,
to keep the connection inside
the silent place where I find
pebbles of intuition, rose quartz.

In the morning, lupines on the trail
to the cliff where the giant trillium blooms,
kelp and seals swimming beyond
the tide pools below.

I run through Indian paintbrush,
milk maids, cinquefoil,
climbing the path where he finds me.

And what is love?
A fire walk initiation
from the ocean through a cathedral of trees,
fuchsia, wild grape, sudden
blue streaks on the wing of a moth
stellar jay wanting to fly free.

                        Diane Frank