Poet Artist Categories

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Elmaz Abinader

Literary Arts: Playwright, Poet, Writer

To be born a writer and an Arab-American in this lifetime creates an imperative for my work and despite an education that led me away from politically charged writing, my life, my family’s country and the political climate demanded I give voice that nuanced characters and moments that have no complication in the media. My work has been inspired by the dislocation of my parents from Lebanon to the US, and has radiated outward to dislocations, occupations, and disenfranchisement of other people in the Arab World and Diaspora. My first book, a memoir, The Children of the Roojme: A Family’s Journey from Lebanon was the story of three generations of Lebanese and their various challenges in finding a home away from their country. Based on diaries, interviews and letters, the book covers two centuries, ending in 1947. My second publication, a poetry collection, In the Country of My Dreams…. Provides a collection of very specific dislocations—not only the family immigration but my own transition from New York to the Midwest and the shock of the open terrain of Nebraska and the intimate relationships with natural elements. In addition to these publications, I have written and performed several one-women plays: Country of Origin, Ramadan Moon, 32 Mohammeds, Voices from the Siege and The Torture Quartet. Each uncovers a personal perspective on the lives of Arabs in the middle of political trauma. For instance, 32 Mohammeds is an intersection with the death of Mohammed al-Durra, a boy killed in Palestine before the second Intifada; Ramadan Moon explores the mythology associated with women who are veiled and the different reasons and responses to the veil. My new poetry collection, This House, My Bones draws parallels between the changes of the earth through natural means to the changes in our bodies during unnatural traumas and how that trauma moves through generations. This collection is being published by Willow Press in October 2014 My current project is a novel, When Silence is Frightening (Working title)

Sally Ashton

Literary Arts: Poet

Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, teacher, and Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. She earned her BA in English with a creative writing minor from SJSU, and her MFA in Poetry and Literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship, Poetry, from Arts Council Silicon Valley and a fellowship from Montalvo Arts Center. She is the author of three books of poetry, two of which were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. Poems also appear in the textbook, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, and Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes, as well as in literary journals such as Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Brevity, Zyzzyva, 5am, Mississippi Review, and Poet Lore. She was awarded the Fish Flash Fiction First Prize, an international award, in 2014. Ashton was appointed the second Santa Clara County Poet Laureate on April 1, 2011. During her term, she compiled a collection of the favorite poems of County residents posted on a project blog. She also hosted a series of public readings of these poems throughout the county. Her project for 2012 was Poetry on the Move, a contest for county residents culminating in winning poems placed in county buses and light rail cars. Besides teaching at San Jose State University, she teaches private workshops and at writer’s workshops including Disquiet: An International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. She has a keen interest in the intersection of the arts and science and in the relation of image to word.

David Denny

Literary Arts: Poet

David Denny is a writer, teacher, and editor. He is the author of three poetry collections: Man Overboard, Fool in the Attic, and Plebeian on the Front Porch. His poems and short stories have appeared in numerous publications, including The Sun, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Stone Voices, and Pearl. Honors and awards include a 2013 Artist Laureate Award from the Silicon Valley Arts Council, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Cupertino, California, and numerous Pushcart Prize nominations. He is former editor-in-chief of Bottomfish magazine.

Chitra Divakaruni

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an award-winning and bestselling author, poet, activist and teacher of writing. Her work has been published in over 50 magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and her writing has been included in over 50 anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, the O.Henry Prize Stories and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her books have been translated into 29 languages, including Dutch, Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and Japanese, and many of them have been used for campus-wide and city-wide reads. Several of her works have been made into films and plays.She lives in Houston with her husband Murthy and has two sons, Anand and Abhay, who are in college. She loves to connect with readers on her Facebook page.

Kat Meads

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

An award-winning writer of fiction, drama, nonfiction and poetry, Kat Meads is a native of eastern North Carolina. She holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and a BA from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, a California Artist Fellowship in fiction and two Silicon Valley Arts Council fellowships. Her short stories have won awards from Chelsea and Inkwell Magazine, her essays from New Letters, Lyra and Drunken Boat. Her historical novel, For You, Madam Lenin, received an IPPY Silver Medal and was a 2012 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her mystery novel, Senestre on Vacation (written as Z.K. Burrus), was a 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year finalist. Her short plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York and the Midwest. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center, Dorland, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. She teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency Red Earth MFA program.

Ann Neelon

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Ann Neelon is a native of Boston and a graduate of the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and of Holy Cross College. She has been a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa, as well as a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her poems and translations have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Pequod, Poetry East, Manoa, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other magazines. She lives with her husband and son in western Kentucky, where she is Assistant Professor of English at Murray State University. Her collection of poems, Easter Vigil, won the 1995 Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Bradley J. Owens

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Bradley J. Owens is a novelist and poet living in San Francisco CA.

David Perez

Literary Arts: Poet

Poet Laureate, Santa Clara County / Author of the Write Bloody poetry collection, “Love in a Time of Robot Apocalypse” / Recipient of the Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship for Literary Art / Regular guest on NPR’s Snap Judgment / Voted 2012’s “Best Author in the Bay” by SF Bay Guardian.

Robert Pesich

Literary Arts: Poet

Robert S. Pesich is the editor for Swan Scythe Press and is the author of Burned Kilim. He also works as a Lab Manager / Research Associate for Stanford University School of Medicine and Palo Alto Veterans Institute for Research. He is the President of Poetry Center San Jose and Coordinator for the Well-RED Reading Series, hosted by the gallery Works/San Jose. His literary work has appeared in many journals and reviews such as Apercus Quarterly, The Bitter Oleander, Circulo de Poesia (Mexico City), CutBank, Oyez Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Slipstream and others. He was awarded the Littoral Press Poetry Prize and fellowships from Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as well as an artist fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley. He lives with his family in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Nils Peterson

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Nils Peterson is Professor Emeritus in English at San José State University. In 2009, he was chosen as the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. He has published poetry, science fiction, and articles on subjects as varied as golf and Shakespeare. His chapbooks include Here Is No Ordinary Rejoicing, Driving a Herd of Moose to Durango, For This Day, The Revenge of the Socks, and For This Day II. A collection of poems, The Comedy of Desire, edited and introduced by Robert Bly, was published by The Blue Sofa Press. Other books include Water, Fire, Earth, & Air, Meditations and Poems on the Four Elements (San José, 2003), A Walk to the Center of Things (Caesura Editions, 2011), and a memoir Talk in the Reading Room (Wordrunner Press, 2014). In 2016, he published earth, water, fire, air a collection of poems each illustrated by a watercolor by Lorraine Chapparall. A new collection of poetry, All the Marvelous Stuff, was just published by the Poetry Center of San José (PCSJ). Coleman Barks called it, “intelligent, lonely, funny, and real.”

Alan Soldofsky

Literary Arts: Poet

Alan Soldofsky has published a new collection of poems, In the Buddha Factory, from Truman State University Press. Also three chapbooks of poems: Kenora Station, Staying Home, and most recently a chapbook that includes a selection of poems by his son, the poet Adam Soldofsky, Holding Adam / My Father’s Books. He has published poems widely in magazines and academic journals including: The Antioch Review, The Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, Grand Street, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Nation, The North American Review, and Poetry East. His poems have three times been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has also contributed essays on modern and contemporary poets to a variety of journals. His articles, essays, interviews, and book reviews have appeared widely in periodicals including Chelsea, Narrative, Poetry Flash, Quarry West, and The Writer’s Chronicle. He is a professor of English and Creative Writing at San Jose State University where he directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Jarvis Subia

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Born and raised in the San José Bay Area, Jarvis Subia’s work delves into his relation with his communities, sexuality, masculinity, national/global politics, lineage, race, gardening, mental health, personal growth, and love. Jarvis is San José’s 2018 Poetry Grand Slam Champion. He has been a part of 5 national poetry slam teams representing his college and city. His accomplishments include: graduating with a BA from San Francisco State University’s Creative Writing program, placing 2nd in the nation for multi-voice poems in 2015 with the Palo Alto slam team, coaching a youth and 2 collegiate poetry slam teams for MACLA in San Jose and SFSU, and participating in the masters writing workshop at the 2017 Las Dos Brujas writers conference. Jarvis is a member of 2017-18 & 2018-19 Youth Speaks’ Emerging Poet Mentors collective, an in-class teaching artist for SFJAZZ’s Jazz In The Middle residency program, and is the after school poetry instructor for the Digital Media & Culture Studio at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana/MACLA, a contemporary Latin arts and community organization based in San José.

Truong Tran

Educator; Literary Arts: Poet; Visual Artist: Mixed Media

Truong Tran (born 1969) is a Vietnamese-American poet, visual artist, and teacher. His collection dust and conscience (2002) won the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Prize, and in 2003, he served as Writer in Residence for Intersection for the Arts. Tran currently lives in San Francisco, where he teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University, and is Writer in Residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts. Artist Statement: Day In The Life … On days when I am not working as a poet and teacher, I try to wake up early. I empty my oversized messenger bag of books and papers and the previous day’s half-eaten lunch. I place the strap over my left shoulder, with the bag firmly secured to my back. I begin to walk. I walk for as long as it takes to fill the bag with stuff: branches, findings from the local thrift stores, choice items left in boxes on sidewalks and, if I’m lucky, something I’ve never seen before. Once the bag is filled, I return home, empty the contents from the bag, creating mounds of what some might consider piles of junk. I see them as source materials and the beginnings to my art making process. I am committed to using these recycled materials as an environmentally conscious artist but also as an artist who strives to make art accessible through both its practice and use of materials. Quite frankly, I get a kick out of forcing these disparate objects to come together, compromising and accommodating one another in their process of becoming something new, something beautiful. I refer to what I do as art making because I do not paint, draw or sculpt in a traditional or learned consideration of artistic craft. My craft is founded in the doing. I glue things together. I make things fit. I dip things in wax. I cut. I build. I weave. I think. I fill things up with paint using ketchup bottles. I stare at things in hopes that these things will talk back to me. This is what I do. It makes me happy. It allows me to lose myself in the process of doing. It makes me sad. It allows me to find myself in the process of seeing. I insist on it being called art at the end of the day.

Michael J. Vaughn

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer; Novelist

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of seventeen books, most recently Mascot, a literary novel set in a minor league baseball park. He is a competitions judge for Writer’s Digest, a thirty-year opera critic, and drummer for the San Francisco rock band Exit Wonderland. Vaughn is also an active poet, with more than 100 poems published in journals both off- and on-line. He graduated from San Jose State with a journalism degree and a classical voice minor. He was born in Brunswick, Maine, and spent much of his childhood shuttling around the country, courtesy of his father Harold’s career as a pilot with the US Navy.

Kirby Wright

Literary Arts: Poet, Writer; Visual Artist

I was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. I am a graduate of Punahou School in Honolulu and the University of California at San Diego. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. I have been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes and three Best of the Nets. I am a past recipient of the Honolulu Weekly Nonfiction Prize, the Jodi Stutz Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, two Browning Society Awards for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, my first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards.I am also the author of the companion novels PUNAHOU BLUES and MOLOKA’I NUI AHINA, both set in Hawaii. I was a Visiting Fellow at the 2009 International Writers Conference in Hong Kong, where I represented the Pacific Rim region of Hawaii and lectured with Pulitzer Prize winner Gary Snyder. I was also a Visiting Writer at the 2010 Martha’s Vineyard Writers Residency in Edgartown, MA, the 2011 Artist in Residence at Milkwood International, Czech Republic, and the 2014 Resident Scholar at the Earthskin Artist Colony in Auckland, New Zealand.

Al Young

Educator; Literary Arts: Poet, Writer

Born May 31, 1939 at Ocean Springs, Mississippi on the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Al Young grew up in the rural South of villages and small towns, and in urban, industrial Detroit. From 1957-1960 he attended the University of Michigan, where he co-edited Generation, the campus literary magazine. In 1961 he emigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area. Settling at first in Berkeley, he held a variety of colorful jobs (folksinger, lab aide, disk jockey, medical photographer, clerk typist, employment counselor) before graduating with honors from U.C. Berkeley with a degree in Spanish. His marriage in 1963 to technical writer and editor Arline Young was blessed with one child: their son Michael, born in 1971. From 1969-1976 he was Edward B. Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford near Palo Alto, where he lived and worked for three decades. In the Y2K year 2000 he returned to Berkeley, where he continues to freelance. Young has taught poetry, fiction writing and American literature at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Davis, Bowling Green State University, Foothill College, the Colorado College, Rice University, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, the University of Arkansas, San José State University, where he was appointed the 2002 Lurie Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing, and Charles University in the Czech Republic under the auspices of the Prague Summer Programs. In the spring of 2003 he taught poetry at Davidson College (Davidson, NC), where he was McGee Professor in Writing. In the fall of 2003, as the first Coffey Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, he taught a poetry workshop. From 2003-2006 he served on the faculty of Cave Canem‘s summer workshop retreats for African American poets. His honors include Wallace Stegner, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the PEN-Library of Congress Award for Short Fiction, the PEN-USA Award for Non-Fiction, two American Book Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, two New York Times Notable Book of the year citations, an Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowship, the Stephen Henderson Achievement Award for Poetry, Radio Pacifica’s KPFA Peace Prize, the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poetry Fellowship, and the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature. At its May 2009 commencement, Whittier College conferred on him its highest honor: the Doctor of Humane Letters degree. On October 4, 2011 at the University of North Carolina’s Historic Players Theatre, Al Young received the 2011 Thomas Wolfe Prize. Young’s many books include novels, collections of poetry, essays, memoirs and anthologies. His work has appeared in Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, the New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature. In the 1970’s he wrote film scripts for producer Joseph Strick, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, and Richard Pryor. In the 1980’s and 90’s, as a cultural ambassador for the United States Information Agency, he traveled throughout South Asia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian West Bank. In 2001 he traveled to the Persian Gulf to lecture on American and African American literature and culture in Kuwait and in Bahrain for the U.S. Department of State. Subsequent lecture tours have taken him to Southern Italy in 2004, and back to India in 2005. His poetry and prose have been translated into Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German, Urdu, Korean, and other languages. Blending story, recitation and song, Young often performs with musicians. In 2005, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed him Poet Laureate of California.

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