Contemporary poetry and poets
We enjoy hearing that past Poetry Show guests are doing well, and receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant qualifies as doing very well indeed.
Natalie Diaz visited the Poetry Show at KUSP in 2013, one of three guest poets that evening. The others were James Baker and Tomas Q. Morin, and all three were on the road to promote new books published by Copper Canyon Press.
To celebrate Natalie’s good fortune, we’re re-posting the podcast from June 9, 2013.
On October 9, 2018, Poetry Santa Cruz was pleased to present poets Zubair Ahmed and Matthew Siegel. Thanks to Felix Kulpa Gallery for making the reading space available.
Zubair Ahmed was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His first book, City of Rivers, was published in the McSweeney’s Poetry Series. He was named a Top Debut poet in 2012 by Poets & Writers, and his work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, and Believer, among others.
Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was shortlisted for the Best First Collection of 2015 by the Forward Arts Foundation in the UK. Poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, The Guardian, PBS NewsHour, Tin House, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford, he currently teaches literature and writing at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
The Poetry Santa Cruz reading for September, 2018, celebrated the passing of the Santa Cruz County poet laureate torch. Robert Sward concluded his two-year term, welcoming new laureate Danusha Lameris to launch her two years in the post. The event was held on Tuesday, September 11, 2018, at Bookshop Santa Cruz.
The two poets read from their own work, followed by a question-and-answer session with the SRO audience of more than sixty. Both poets and the Q&A are included in this podcast.
D. Nurkse and Nancy Miller Gomez read for Poetry Santa Cruz on June 12, 2018. The event was held at Felix Kulpa Gallery.
Nancy Miller Gomez’s work has appeared in River Styx, Rattle, The Bellingham Review, Nimrod and elsewhere. She was a semi-finalist for the 2017 Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize and was nominated twice for a Pushcart. She recently completed her Masters in Fine Arts in Poetry at Pacific University and volunteers as the director of an organization that provides poetry and writing workshops to incarcerated men and women in Santa Cruz County. Her first chapbook, Punishment, was just published as part of the Rattle Chapbook Series:https://www.rattle.com/chapbooks/punishment/
The first Poetry Santa Cruz reading of 2018 featured a quartet of local poets (reading in this order): William Ward Butler, Meg Freitag, Lisa Allen Ortiz, and Debra Spencer. The reading, held at Bookshop Santa Cruz for a good-sized and receptive audience, was followed by a brief Q&A.