San José Poetry Festival | Small Press Fair Readings & Ecopoetry Panel

As  part of San José Poetry Festival 2020, the Small Press Fair highlights  Bay Area publishers and artists reading samples of their offerings via  Zoom. Featured guests for this event will include a panel of Lucille  Lang Day, Jade Bradbury, Tobey Hiller, and Lisa Rosenberg discussing  ecopoetry, titled “Words for the Earth: Poetry, Ecology, and  Environmental Action.” The four panelists will discuss the definition of  an ecopoem, what inspires them to write ecopoetry, and what they see as  the relationship between ecopoetry and environmental activism. They  will also read ecopoems, talk about writers at the forefront of  environmental writing whose work they admire, and tell about their own  process for writing ecopoems. Hosted by Mighty Mike McGee.

*Free event, but Eventbrite ticket registration is required for all attendees.*

This  is Day Six of our six-day festival! Check out all the events that are  part of the sixth annual San José Poetry Festival or get a festival  pass: https://bit.ly/pcsjtix

Lucille  Lang Day (panel moderator) is co-editor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of  California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018) and the author of ten poetry  collections and chapbooks, most recently Becoming an Ancestor and  Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems. She is also a co-editor of Red  Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and the author  of two children’s books and a memoir. Her poems, essays, and short  stories have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, and her many  honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland/Josephine  Miles Literary Awards, and ten Pushcart Prize nominations.

Jade  Bradbury is the author of In the Willing Dirt (Purple Passion Press,  2019). Her poems have been published in Poetry on the Move (2013), Song  of Los Gatos, Poems of the Gem City (2014), The Literary Nest, Vol. 1,  Issue 1 (2015), (AFTER)life, Poems and Stories of the Dead (2015),  Spring Mother Tongue (2017), Caesura/Arrival (2019), and Celebrate  Creativity, A Cupertino Community Anthology (2020). Other writings have  been published in newspapers, magazines, books, and online publications.

Tobey  Hiller writes poetry and fiction. She is the author of four books of  poems: Crossings, Certain Weathers, Aqueduct, and most recently, Crow  Mind (June 2020). She is also author of Charlie’s Exit, a novel, and a  number of writings about literature and psychology. Her poems have  appeared in many magazines, including Askew, Ambush Review, Canary,  Sisyphus, MusePie Press’s Shotglass Journal, Mediterranean Poetry, and  Milkweed Chronicle, as well as five anthologies, most recently Fire and  Rain: Ecopoetry of California and The Wild (Marin Poetry Center, 2019).  Her poetry has won magazine awards; her fiction has been short-listed  for three prizes.

Poet  and recovering engineer Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different  Physics, winner of the Red Mountain Poetry Prize. She holds degrees in  physics and creative writing and worked for many years in the space  program. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford  University, she served as the 2017/2018 Poet Laureate of San Mateo  County, California. Lisa’s poems explore shared territory in arts and  sciences and the drive to question inherited models. She was recently  named a MOSAIC Fellow with Sangam Arts and will be a 2020 Djerassi  Resident in Scientific Delirium Madness.

Additional  Participating Publishers & Artists: Ashkum Kumar, Blue Bone Books,  Darkhouse Books, Dutch Poet Press, Gabrielle LaFrank, Joseph Jason  Santiago LaCour, Kevin Arnold, Thinking Ink Press, Tim Myers, and more.

*San José Poetry Festival 2020*

The  sixth annual San José Poetry Festival celebrates our community’s  diverse ethnic and cultural heritage with a wide range of topics and  literary styles reflected in performances, workshops, and a small press  fair. This year, the festival will move online to keep our community  safe while keeping us all connected.

San  José Poetry Festival 2020 is presented by Poetry Center San José and is  sponsored in part by: Festival and Cultural Affairs grants from the  City of San José; a grant from SVCreates, in partnership with the County  of Santa Clara and the California Arts Council; funding from Poets  & Writers; and with support from Anne & Mark's Art Party and The  Center for Literary Arts. We would like to acknowledge and offer our  deepest gratitude to our originally booked live venues for this  festival: the Art Boutiki, Books Inc., Caravan Lounge, Dr. Martin Luther  King Jr. Library, Forager, History/San José, Recycle Bookstore, and  Works/San José.