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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.

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.

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.

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.

Diane Yohn

Literary Arts: Playwright, Writer

Writer for stage, television, film, novella, & poetry. Visual artist in photography & computer art with showings at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, CA, Santa Barbara Arts Pavilion; cover art for numerous books (“The Secret Power of Naming”, “Love in the Fast Lane”, “I Was Indian” Volume II) CURRENTLY: Advisory Board Member for Wild Blackhorse Press ~ Where Indigenous Writing Thrives: www.wildblackhorsepress.com Currently accepting and perusing submissions for an anthology of indigenous erotica. Retired from the following: Founder & Artistic Director of Ableza & Facyt – Native American Arts Association & its youth theatre counterpart, First Americans Conservatory Youth Theatre. Endowed Chair for Radio, T.V., & Film – San Jose State University Intersession programs in Oral Tradition at Stanford University. Guest lectures include: Stanford University University of Washington – Seattle University of California – Santa Barbara, Riverside, Hayward Humboldt State University University of Georgia – Athens. Keystone Speaker & Presenter for the American Alliance of Theatre & Education – Salt Lake City, UT. Feature Presenter of original works: American Literary Association National Conference in Long Beach, CA: “Full Circle” – a one-woman multimedia play. Native American Literature Symposium: In Puerto Vallarta, Mexico: “EverySkin’s Day In Court” In Mystic Lake, MN: “Raw Pearl” Presenter: International Alternative Theatre Conference: Alternative Space – University of San Francisco California Arts Council Conferences – Lake Pomo, CA & Asilomar Awards: Arts Council of Silicon Valley Fellowship in Playwriting for “Tiospe” Frank Silvera’s Writers Workshop Award (NYC) for “Tiospe” American Theatre Association National Award for “The Aftermath” National as well as International Women’s Conference Arts Awards for “Pros & Cons” Recent Publications: Volumes I & II of “I Was Indian” Native American Literature Anthologies of 2010 & 2012 SableLit Magazine 2010 – Indigenous Writers Issue Yellow Medicine Review 2008 Alleged co-conspirator in Kolawin-gate & The Lodgepole Bar; cover-art and poetry contributor for Native American erotic literature collection entitled “Moon of the Popping Cherries”; and even wilder controversies.

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