poetry flash

Poetry Flash is an online review and literary calendar for California and the West, featuring book reviews, essays, homages, poems, columns, and calls for submissions. Poetry Flash presents a regular reading series in Berkeley, produces the Northern California Book Awards, and sponsors the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival. Our heartfelt mission is to build community through literary events and publishing. See more athttps://poetryflash.org/.

Poetry Flash Readers & Writers

Four poets read to celebrate building community through literature, all of whom have been featured in Poetry Flash Readings, or reviewed and published in Poetry Flash, plus our Associate Editor. The reading will be emceed by Joyce Jenkins, Editor and Director of Poetry Flash.

Heather Bourbeau’s work has appeared in 100 Word Story, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, The Stockholm Review of Literature, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. She is the winner of La Piccioletta Barca’s inaugural competition and the Chapman Magazine Flash Fiction winner, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has been featured in several anthologies, including Nothing Short Of 100: Selected Tales from 100 Word Story (Outpost 19), America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press), and Respect: Poems About Detroit Music (Michigan State University Press).

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Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her new collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House, longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and shortlisted for The Golden Poppy Awards 2021. D.A. Powell wrote of it, "Poetry has long been a vessel, a container of history, emotion, perceptions…These poems are portals to other worlds and to our own, a space in which one sees and one is seen. A marvelous, timely and resilient book.” Maw Shein Win’s collections include Invisible Gifts: Poems; her chapbooks include Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She is the inaugural Poet Laureate of El Cerrito (2016–2018). http://www.mawsheinwin.com/

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Richard Silberg is a poet, critic, translator, and Associate Editor of Poetry Flash. He is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Horses: New and Selected Poems and Deconstruction of the Blues, recipient of the PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award and nominee for the Northern California Book Award. His books include Reading the Sphere: A Geography of Contemporary American Poetry. He co-translated, with Clare You, The Three Way Tavern, by Ko Un, foreword by Gary Snyder, which received the Northern California Book Award in Translation. He also co-translated Flowers Long For Stars, poems by Oh Sae-Young, This Side of Time, by Ko Un, and I Must Be the Wind, by Moon Chung-Hee. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Parthenon West Review, ZYZZYVA, Eleven Eleven, and New American Writing.

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Sam Sax’s latest book of poems is Bury It. Tyehimba Jess says, “Bury It, Sam Sax’s urgent, thriving excavation of desire, is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn.…A vitalizing and necessary book of poems that dig hard and lift luminously.” Bury It received the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Their first collections are Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters; their poems were included In Absentia: Reflections on the Pandemic. A queer Jewish writer and educator, they are a two-time Bay Area Grand Slam champion, and have received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. https://www.samsax.com/  

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The Bookmark Bookstore is a unique shopping experience located in Old Oakland. Proceeds from the Bookmark benefit Oakland's Public libraries! Shop & support us in our store or online.

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Venue: Bookmark Bookstore Leg: One 4:00PM