Poetry: Festival of California Poets

Co-presented with PEN USA

The Festival of California Poets is an event celebrating the poetic tradition of the Golden State. Three distinguished, contemporary California poets will introduce and read poems by canonical California poets, as well as their own poems. A question-and-answer session will follow the readings. Featured readers include: Dana Goodyear on Thom Gunn; Joy Manesiotis on Larry Levis; and Carol Muske-Dukes on Ann Stanford.

Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Honey and Junk, a collection of poems. She teaches in the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California and is a cofounder of Figment. Her new collection, The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard, will be published in January.

Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight collections of poetry, four novels, two essay collections, and coeditor of two anthologies. She is currently professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she founded the PhD program in creative writing and literature. She writes for Huffington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, and has been a National Book Award finalist, Guggenheim and NEA fellow, winner of six Pushcart Prizes, a Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers, and she recently finished her term as Poet Laureate of California. Her work will also be featured in Best American Poetry this year and for the 25th anniversary edition. For more information, visit carolmuskedukes.com.

Joy Manesiotis is the author of They Sing to Her Bones, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize from New Issues Press. Individual poems and essays have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry International, as well as in translation in the Romanian journal Scrisul Romanesc. Her essay, “What I Learned in Art School,” was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2011. Among other awards, Manesiotis has received fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Graves Award, and Ragdale Foundation. In May 2012, her poems were dropped over Nicosia, Cyprus, as part of Spring Poetry Rain, an international cultural event to foster peace in the last divided city in Europe. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Redlands.

PEN Center USA, a literary nonprofit based in Beverly Hills, has a membership of more than 600 professional writers. PEN Center USA strives to protect the rights of writers around the world, to stimulate interest in the written word, and to foster a vital literary community among the diverse writers living in the western United States. PEN Center USA has a long, successful history planning literary events in and around Los Angeles.