Willis Barnstone is a writer of comparative literature, biblical studies, and poetry, as well as a translator, with 18 books of poetry, 5 of criticism, 20 of translation, and many others. He has spent extended periods in Mexico, Spain, France, England, Greece, and China. He began writing poetry when he was twenty years old; his first published poem appeared in the Anglo-French periodical Points. His first book of poems published in the United States was From This White Island, reflecting on his time on an island in Greece. One of Barnstone's closest friends and mentors was author Jorge Luis Borges. In an essay written for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Barnstone confides, "I see poetry, fiction, and scholarship as Borges did. They are the work of a writer and move into each other, separated by typography."

Tony Barnstone was educated at Wesleyan University; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a PhD under poets Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass. A poet, translator, editor, and writer of fiction, Barnstone’s books include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, (2009) winner of both the John Ciardi Prize and the Grand Prize in the Strokestown International Poetry Festival. Barnstone has published several other poetry collections, including The Golem of Los Angeles (2007), which won the Benjamin Saltman Award in Poetry; Sad Jazz: Sonnets (2005); and Impure (1999), a finalist for both the Walt Whitman Prize and the National Poetry Series. He has published numerous translations and several textbooks on world literature.

Dana Gioia Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Gioia has published three full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the NBCC award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture. Gioia has published many literary anthologies and his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.

Reading is at 7:30. Potluck is at 6:30. Come celebrate the holidays in poetry style!
Bring a poem (25 lines max!).
And a dish to share:

  
      A – H: Dessert
      I – P: Salad 
      Q – Z: Main Dish 

Indigo Moor is a playwright, poet, and author. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. Moor won the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers and a 2008 Jack Kerouac Poetry Prize. Moor is a graduate member of the Artist's Residency Institute for Teaching Artists, and his collaborative efforts include the Artists Embassy Intl. Dancing Poetry Festival, the Livermore Ekphrastic Project, and the Davis Jazz Arts Festival.

Wanda Phipps is a writer/performer living in Brooklyn, NY. Her publications and recordings include Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire, Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems, and the CD-Rom Zither Mood. Her poetry has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician and Bangla. She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Theater Translation Fund, and others. As a founding member of Yara Arts Group she has collaborated on numerous theatrical productions presented in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Siberia, and at La MaMa, E.T.C. in NYC. She curated several reading series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church and has written about the arts for Time Out New York, Paper Magazine, and About.com. Her website is www.mindhoney.com.

Former Poet Laureate Al Young's 22 books include poetry (Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry, Coastal Night and Inland Afternoons: Poems 2001-2006, The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000, Heaven: Poems Collected 1956-1990), fiction (Seduction By Light, Sitting Pretty, Who Is Angelina?), and musical memoirs (Mingus Mingus: Two Memoirs, Drowning in the Sea of Love, Kinds of Blue, Things Ain’t What They Used to Be, Bodies & Soul. From 2005 through 2008 he served as poet laureate of California. Other honors include NEA, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships. Jazz Idiom, the 2009 PEN/Oakland Award. Al Young is currently the Visiting Writer at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. His website is www.AlYoung.org.

Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, UC Santa Cruz and Esalen Institute. A Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His more than 20 books include FOUR INCARNATIONS (Coffee House Press), now in its second printing. HEAVENLY SEX; and the COLLECTED POEMS, also in its second printing. Robert will soon be on tour with his NEW & SELECTED POEMS, 1957-2011 due out from Red Hen Press, October, 2011. Born and raised in Chicago, Robert served in the U.S. Navy in the combat zone during the Korean War and later worked for CBC Radio and as a book reviewer and feature writer for the Toronto Star and Globe & Mail in Canada. He lives now in Santa Cruz with his wife, visual artist Gloria K. Alford.

Joseph Stroud is the author of five books of poetry: IN THE SLEEP OF RIVERS, SIGNATURES, BELOW COLD MOUNTAIN, COUNTRY OF LIGHT, and OF THIS WORLD: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, and five limited editions: UNZEN, BURNING THE YEARS, THREE ODES OF PABLO NERUDA, UKIYO-E, and NIGHT PSALMS. His work has earned a Pushcart Prize and he was selected by the U.S. Poet Laureate for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in Poetry from the Library of Congress. His poems have been featured in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times as well as on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac from National Public Radio. His most recent book, OF THIS WORLD, won the Poetry Center Book Award and was also a finalist for the PEN Literary Award USA, the California Book of the Year Award, and the Northern California Book Award.

Troy Jollimore is the author of two books of poetry, At Lake Scugog (Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for 2006; and a philosophical book, Love's Vision (Princeton University Press, 2011). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, The Believer, and elsewhere. He is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Chico.

Dean Rader has published widely in the fields of poetry, literary studies, and popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. He has also received the Crab Creek Review poetry prize and the Sow’s Ear Review poetry prize, and his poem “Twilight at Ocean Beach: 14” was recently named by Verse Daily as one of the Best Poems of 2010. He serves on the editorial board for DMQ Review, he evaluates manuscripts for various publishers, and he reviews poetry for The Rumpus and The San Francisco Chronicle. Additionally, he recently curated a special issue of Sentence devoted to American Indian prose poetry. In 2010, he began writing a weekly column for the City Brights section of the San Francisco Chronicle. Dean is a Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.

Molly Peacock,is a poet and nonfiction writer. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, including THE SECOND BLUSH and CORNUCOPIA: NEW & SELECTED POEMS, both published by W.W. Norton and Company (US and UK) and McClelland and Stewart (Canada). Her poems have appeared in leading literary journals such as The TLS, New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, as well as in numerous anthologies, including The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. She is the Series Editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English and the Poetry Editor of the Literary Review of Canada. She serves on the Graduate Faculty of the Spalding University Brief Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Deema K. Shehabi is a poet, writer, and editor. She grew up in the Arab world and attended college in the US, where she received an MS in Journalism at Boston College. Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, New Letters, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Perihelion, Drunken Boat, Bat City Review, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and The Poetry of Arab Women. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart prize three times, and she served as Vice-President for the Radius of Arab-American Writers (RAWI) between 2007 and 2010. She currently resides in Northern California with her husband and two sons.