Why There Are Words welcomes readers from the Chicago-based lit journal RHINO, when Senior Poetry Editor Angela Narciso Torres blows into town from the Windy City. RHINO is an award-winning literary annual journal which invites traditional and experimental work reflecting passion, originality, artistic conviction, and a love affair with language publishing poetry, flash fiction, and translations. As if that weren’t enough, special guest Roy Mash (whose work was also published in RHINO) will read from his first book. Join us July 10, 7 pm, at Studio 333 in Sausalito for a night that will blow you away. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10.
Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2003 Tampa Review Prize, the 1998 Anhinga Poetry Prize, and bronze medal from Foreword magazine, and a Discovery/The Nation award. Her fourth poetry collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (2014), inaugurates a new poetry series for Louisiana State University Press. She has work appearing in several new anthologies, including The Places That Inhabit Us, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She received a PhD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, and lives and works in Davis, California.
Karen Llagas is a recipient of the second Filamore Tabios, Sr. Memorial Poetry Prize, and her first collection of poetry, Archipelago Dust, was published by Meritage Press in 2010. She has an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and a BA in Economics from Ateneo de Manila. The recipient of a Hedgebrook Residency and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, she lives in San Francisco, where she works as a Tagalog interpreter & lecturer at UC Berkeley and a poet-teacher with the California Poets in the Schools (CPITS).
Roy Mash is a long time board member of Marin Poetry Center. He holds degrees in English, Philosophy, and Computer Science, though he currently doodles his time away staring out of café windows, dabbing up the seeds that have fallen from an everything bagel, and mentally thumbing over his poems that have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Evansville Review, Nimrod, Passages North, Poetry East, RHINO, and River Styx. His first full-length book, Buyer’s Remorse (Cherry Grove Collections,) came out in 2014 to wild acclaim in his head.
Born in Madrid, Spain, Cintia Santana is the author of Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1985-1995). She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University. Her work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, The Missouri Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, RHINO, Anti-, and Pleiades. Her homophonic poem, “Qasida of Grief,” was selected by C.D. Wright as the winner of The Sycamore Review’s 2013 Wabash Poetry Prize. Currently, she teaches fiction and poetry workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation courses, at Stanford University.
Kevin Simmonds is a writer and musician originally from New Orleans. His books include Bend to it, Mad for Meat, and Collective Brightness. He wrote the music and co-wrote the script for “Emmett Till, a river,” commissioned by the Creative Work Fund and premiered at San Francisco’s Theatre of Yugen last November. He also wrote the musical score for the Emmy Award-winning documentary “HOPE: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica,” commissioned by the Pulitzer Center and featured on PBS NewsHour. He has received three San Francisco Arts Commission grants and recently received the Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner. He teaches music privately in San Francisco’s Marina district.
Daniel Suarez is a first generation Cuban-American born and raised in Chicago and currently resides in San Francisco. He is an MFA candidate at SFSU for Creative Writing and Editor in Chief for The Gorilla Press. His poems have appeared in The Columbia Poetry Review, RHINO, Metonym, The Quotable, Samizdat Literary Journal, and elsewhere.
Angela Narciso Torres’ first book of poetry, Blood Orange, won the 2013 Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry. Recent work appears in Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and Cream City Review. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, Ragdale Foundation, and Midwest Writing Center. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in Chicago, where she teaches poetry workshops and serves as a senior poetry editor for RHINO.
Why There Are Words takes place every second Thursday of the month, when people come from San Francisco, the North Bay, the East Bay–everywhere–to crowd the house. The brainchild of Peg Alford Pursell, this literary goodness has been going strong into its fifth year.
