PLNU M.A. in Writing Program Presents: Across the Genres: A Reading.

Featured Headliners:
Kevin Kearney — Fiction
Marco Wilkinson — Nonfiction
Daniela Sow — Poetry

New Voices is our popular biannual event will feature exceptional student writers from the Fall 2024 semester's creative writing courses performing their new and original works of short and flash fiction, novel excerpts, literary nonfiction, poetry, drama, and hybrid works.

Editors and Contributors from Poetry International, SDSU Press, Pacific Review, and Splice will read selections from their latest publications and share insight on their work as editors, creatives, and literary citizens.

For more information on Poetry International, please visit: https://www.poetryinternationalonline.com/

For more information on SDSU Press, please visit: https://sdsupress.sdsu.edu/menu.html

For more information on Pacific Review, please visit: https://pacificreview.sdsu.edu/

For more information on Splice, please visit: https://cal.sdsu.edu/research/undergraduate-journal

FREE to Attend Poetry and spoken word hosted by Ted Washington & Julie Corrales every 4th Thursday of the month with different featured Artists every month.

A poetry reading series at San Diego Civic Center Concourse w/ San Diego Poet Laureate Jason Magabo Perez f/ special guest Ron Salisbury, inaugural San Diego Poet Laureate 2020-2021, & author of Please Write and Tell Me What I Looked Like When You Met Me (2022).

Join multi-hyphenate artist Gill Sotu for the launch and celebration of his debut book of performance and page poetry, Equally Strange, Beautifully Different.

Gill’s first solo collection celebrates our differences while seeking out the things that hold us together. It’s meant to be read out loud, with spirit, and with a goal to touch, challenge, and light up something inside readers. Audience Q&A will follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing.

Please scroll down to register. Refreshments served.

About Gill Sotu:

Gill Sotu is a Navy veteran, poet, playwright, DJ, and performing artist.  He is a two-time Grand Slam Poetry Champion, two-time Raw Performing Artist of the Year, and five-time TEDx San Diego presenter. Currently, he is a teaching artist and a commissioned playwright with The Old Globe Theatre & La Jolla Playhouse, and the official Poet in Residence for the San Diego Writer's Festival.  He has over 10 years of experience teaching written and performing arts within the penal system, working directly with incarcerated persons and in recovery settings, as well as with veterans and students from junior high to college. 

General Body Meetings

November 16th, 3-7pm

Poetry and Music.

bearwolf. poet, Dr. Angelica Yanez, Julie Corrales

Elixir Reading and Conversation with Chus Pato / Lectura de Elíxir y Conversación con Chus Pato: SDPA and Conversations with Poets present a special online live video interview with 2024 Spanish National Poetry Prize Winner, Chus Pato. Select readings from the 2023-24 Elixir SDPA, which features one of Chus Pato’s poems, will follow. Join Elixir Editors, Olga García and Michael Klam, as they host this virtual event in Spanish and English. FREE Please register for Zoom link.

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of a number of books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His most recent novel, Crab, was published in 2017 by Submodern Books. Other recent publications include Haze: Essays, Poems, and Prose (Edge Books 2004), and a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy, and a novel, The Quarry and The Lot. Temporary Worker Rides a Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and he has co-edited two essay collections, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s, and A Poetics of Criticism.

Mark Wallace is this year’s featured guest presenter for the annual Lester Bangs Memorial Reading, which honors influential music journalist, author, and musician, Lester Bangs. Bangs, an El Cajon native and Grossmont College alumnus, is widely credited for having coined the terms "punk" and "heavy metal.” In 2009, Grossmont College officially honored Bangs’s international celebrity status by dedicating to him a bronze "Walk of Fame" plaque, located in the Main Quad in front of the Tech Mall.

Date and Time

Details

The second reading in the 2024-2025 Lindsay J. Cropper Memorial Writers Series will feature USD’s very own poet Malachi Black on November 7, 2024 at 6 p.m., in the Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice Theatre. The reading will be followed by a dessert reception and book signing. Event is free and open to the public. 

Malachi Black is the author of Indirect Light, forthcoming from Four Way Books in fall 2024, and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky). A 2024-25 Fulbright fellow, Black is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Amy Clampitt House, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Emory University, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Hawthornden Castle, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation (a 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship), the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. Black is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.

All are welcome to attend. For more information, please contact the Cropper Center for Creative Writing Director and Associate Professor Brad Melekian, at melekian@sandiego.edu.

Sponsored by University of San Diego’s Cropper Center for Creative Writing and the Department of English.

The Lindsay J. Cropper Center for Creative Writing was established at USD in 2004 with a generous gift from Barrie and Dorothy Cropper in memory of their daughter, Lindsay J. Cropper, an alumna of USD, an English major and aspiring writer, who died tragically in 2000. The purpose of the center is to foster the appreciation and practice of creative writing at the University of San Diego by hosting an annual Writers Series, sponsoring a literary journal, promoting the development of writing courses and granting awards for creative writing.

Allison Joseph will read from her most recent collection of poetry, Confessions of a Barefaced Woman and answer questions from attendees. Joseph has been celebrated as “… a master of poetic form and technique, which she artfully integrates into her frank, honest, confiding voice.” This event is co-sponsored by the Instructionally Related Activities Fund.

Register in advance for this event: Zoom

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University. A graduate of Kenyon College and Indiana University, she serves as poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review, the publisher of No Chair Press, and the director of Writers In Common. Her books and chapbooks includeConfessions of a Barefaced Woman(Red Hen Press), What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand Press), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon University Press), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press), Worldly Pleasures (Word Tech Communications), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon UP), Voice: Poems (Mayapple Press), My Father's Kites (Steel Toe Books), Trace Particles (Backbone Press), Little Epiphanies (NightBallet Press), Mercurial (Mayapple Press), Mortal Rewards (White Violet Press), Multitudes (Word Poetry), The Purpose of Hands (Glass Lyre Press), Double Identity (Singing Bone Press) Corporal Muse (Sibling Rivalry Press) and What Once You Loved (Barefoot Muse Press). She has also published fiction and nonfiction, and travels frequently to read from her work at various festivals, conferences, and universities.

San Diego Writers Festival (SDWF) in partnership with the Community Mondays program at the Mingei Museum is proud to present an evening of joyful celebration and inspiration, honoring the creative contributions of San Diego's women authors. The event includes the book launch and presentation of POWER POINT by Jane Muschenetz, SDWF's 2024 Poetry Collection of the Year Winner, and a lively book fair featuring the works of local powerhouse women authors and women-powered literary organizations.

Join the Circuit Libraries for our next Author Talk event featuring Craig Santos Perez.

Craig Santos Perez is a Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is a National Book Award winner and the editor of nine anthologies, including Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures. He is also the author of “Habitat Threshold” and “From Unincorporated Territory [åmot].” For the past twenty years, he has been involved in demilitarization, sovereignty, environmental justice, and climate change movements across the Pacific.

Rudy Francisco is one of the most recognizable names in Spoken Word Poetry.  He was born, raised and still resides in San Diego, California. At the age of 21, Rudy completed his B.A in Psychology and decided to continue his education by pursuing a M.A in Organizational Studies. As an artist, Rudy Francisco is a motley of social critique, introspection, honesty and humor. He uses personal narratives to discuss the politics of race, class, gender and religion while simultaneously pinpointing and reinforcing the interconnected nature of human existence. 

Join us for SDWI’s First Friday Poetry Reading, November 1, 2024 from 5:15 PM – 6 PM, followed by an art gallery open house from 6 PM – 8 PM. The poetry portion of the evening features poets from The Poetry Salon and will be hosted by Leslie Hodge.

Poetry reading from San Diego Poet Laureate Jason Magabo Perez/San Diego Poetry Futures 2024, in Celebration of Filipino American History Month. In addition to his own works, he will include readings from Filipino American poets, take questions, and then collaborate on a group poem at the end as time permits.

Description

FREE to Attend Poetry and spoken word hosted by Ted Washington & Julie Corrales every 4th Thursday of the month with different featured Artists every month.

The San Diego, Tijuana ReEvolutionary Poetry Brigade present a social justice event with poetry, voter education and voter registration — we’ll have forms to help you register to vote, poetry, & film clips to encourage you to vote!

A poetry reading series at Civic Center Concourse w/ San Diego Poet Laureate Jason Magabo Perez & f/ special guests: Jane Muschenetz, author of Power Point (2024) & Ted Washington, author of Bone Lyre (2023).

The Persian Cultural Center and San Diego Central Library present an unforgettable celebration of Hafez, the 14th century Persian poet of love, peacemaking and reconciliation. UCSD world history and cultures librarian, Dr. Farshad Sonboldel will lecture on Hafez, his enduring appeal, and his central place in the literature of Iran and the rest of the world. Live Persian classical music by Dornob Trio. 

Register required.  Refreshments served.

700 years after his death, Hafez remains one of the world’s most revered writers, the only one to have a national holiday named after him, reflecting the unparalleled legacy of his work. For centuries, Iran has produced some of the world’s most influential and inspiring poets including Omar Khayyam and Rumi, the best-selling poet in the US for the past 10 years. Besides Iran, Hafez Day is celebrated in 61 other countries across the globe.

About Farshad Sonboldel:

Dr. Sonboldel is an award-winning poet and literary critic who publishes in both English and Persian. He’s the author of Naqd-e Irad and of The Rebellion of Forms in Modern Persian Poetry: Politics of Poetic Experimentation. He is the editor of MELA Notes (Journal of the Middle East Librarians' Association) and deputy editor of the Iranian Studies Journal. Sonboldel is a Bahari Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book, Bodleian Libraries at Oxford.

About the Persian Cultural Center:

The Persian Cultural Center is a non-profit, non-religious and non-political national organization. Our mission is to provide an enriching and welcoming environment for all who seek to strengthen the bonds of community, culture and cross-cultural understanding. Subscribe to our Peyk Magazine published in print and online in both English and Persian.

Daniela Paraguya Sow (she/her) was born in New York City, New York, and she was raised in Angeles City, Philippines, and in various cities in Southern California. She and her family currently live in San Diego, where she serves as an Associate Professor of English at Grossmont College.  Her writing has appeared in Mixed Asian Media, The Plentitudes Journal, The Hyacinth Review, The Lumiere Review, and elsewhere. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Half Moon Rising, is now available for purchase (Kelsay Books, May 2024). Connect with her at danielasow.com

FREE

Event Details:
Date: October 6th, 2024
Time: 6:30 PM (Doors open at 6:15 PM)
Location: Verbatim Books, San Diego

Event Description:
Join us for a compelling evening of poetry at Verbatim Books as we host the San Diego stop of Anastasia DiFonzo’s book tour for her new poetry collection, Girl. (Gnashing Teeth Publishing, 2024).

Anastasia will be reading selections from Girl., an incisive and unflinching exploration of femininity, beauty, and the interplay of violence and desire. Accompanying her will be a lineup of exceptional local poets—Ted Washington, Meg Fagundes, and Jessica Zimmermann—each bringing their unique voices to this intimate gathering.

Praise for Girl.:

"Girl. by Anastasia DiFonzo is an incisive meditation on femininity, beauty, and violence that both beget. Each poem arrives as its own sort of mirror –– a mirror that the author either confronts, shrouds, smashes, or, most intensely – places the reader in front of, demanding they peer deeply, and discover the hidden parts of themselves in the cracked glass."
— Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me

"In her second poetry chapbook, Anastasia DiFonzo deftly unravels and reforms our understandings of desire, shame, generational wounds, and bodily identity. Much like the actual lived experience of girlhood for so many, Girl. is both jagged and soft, aggrieved yet full of longing."
— Sierra DeMulder, author of Ephemera

"Anastasia DiFonzo’s raw and unflinching poems are not only poems of the body, but speak to the sometimes heartbreaking resiliency it takes to inhabit a body in girlhood through womanhood. DiFonzo’s collection holds a keen sense of awareness, an unwavering honesty, and a fierce attention to detail. These poems look you in the eye and do not look away."
— Sheleen McElhinney, author of Every Little Vanishing

About the Poets:

• Anastasia DiFonzo is an Oakland-based poet, three-time Best of the Net nominee, and author of the debut chapbook A Certain Serenity (Puna Press, 2022). When not writing, she enjoys coffee with her cats.

• Ted Washington is an artist, author, and founder of Puna Press. He hosts the Palabra poetry reading and open mic in Barrio Logan. His latest book is Bone Lyre.

• Meg Fagundes is a queer, non-binary Buddhist and clinical psychologist specializing in trauma and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Their poetry is a powerful expression of their personal journey and advocacy for the suffering of all living beings.

• Jessica Zimmermann is a Southern Californian poet whose work addresses mental health, women’s rights, and social justice. Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies, and she regularly performs at open mics in San Diego.

Lee Coulter, Gill SOTU & Dave Booda Songwriters-in-the-Round @ EVO Tea House Concert Series

San Diego Writers, Ink presents October’s First Friday poetry reading on Friday, October 4 at 5:15 PM. The reading will feature Jane Muschenetz and Friends.

The annual celebration of The Poetry Party, The Poetical Party of Choice featuring performances by The Mightier P.E.N.S. (Poetic Expeditionary Nation of Semanticists), Storyteller, Alex Bosworth, framed by Open Mic Poetry, read by several of the finest poets of the deep Southwest. Admission is free. Light refreshments will be served. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Event takes place in the Santa Fe Room.

FREE to Attend Poetry and spoken word hosted by Ted Washington & Julie Corrales every 4th Thursday of the month with different featured Artists every month.

On September 26th, Featured Artist is Sandy Shakes with Open Mic to follow.

On September 25, 2024, Dr. Byas will lead two events at PLNU as part of the 26th Annual Poetry Day. She will conduct a poetry craft lecture and writing workshop at 3 p.m. at Fermanian Conference Center followed by an evening poetry reading at 7 p.m. at Fermanian Conference Center. Book sales and signing will follow the evening reading courtesy of La Playa Books. Both events are free and open to the public.

Adam O. Davis and Arthur Kayzakian will read from their recent poetry collections: Index of Haunted Houses and The Book of Redacted Paintings. This event is co-sponsored by the Instructionally Related Activities Fund.

Adam O. Davis is the author of index of haunted houses (Sarabande books, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton poetry prize and finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial award from the poetry society of America, he has received grants and fellowships from The Bishop's School, Columbia University, the New Literary Project, the Prague Summer program for writers, and Vermont studio center. He is also, with Colin Waters, the co-creator & host of the Poetry Goes to the Movies podcast. His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The believer, The best American Poetry, Boston review, The Cincinnati Review, Denver quarterly, the Paris review, the Poetry Review, the southern review, West Branch, and zyzzyva.

Arthur Kayzakian is the finalist for the 2023 Kate Tufts Award, and the winner of the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, which was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is also the winner of the Open Chapbook Competition for his chapbook, My Burning City. He has been a finalist for the Locked Horn Press Chapbook Prize, Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, the C.D. Wright Prize, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and the Black River Chapbook Competition. He serves as the Poetry Chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance (IALA).

Sept. 24, 7pm, multilingual Zoom reading, SDPA’s bilingual edition, Elixir, featuring our 2024 anthology authors from San Diego/Tijuana/Mexico/Spain (Galicia). Hosted by Olga and Michael. Zoom link and details forthcoming.