We’re pleased to announce the publication of our eleventh issue of the OGQ (Omnium Gatherum Quarterly) with poetry by Nicholas Reiner and Chrystal AC Salas; essays by Jimin Han, Cai Emmons, Kristen Leigh Schwarz, Susanne Pari, and Keenan Norris; a lyrical essay by Suzanne Roberts; a tribute by Robert Lipton; memoir excerpts by Emi Nietfeld and Christopher Upham; and notes by Matthew Zapruder.
The OQG is edited each quarter by Andrew Tonkovich.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alumni and teaching staff who have published books during the fourth quarter of 2022! We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below. Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
NEW BOOKS FROM WRITERS WORKSHOPS ALUMS & TEACHING STAFF
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alumni and teaching staff who have published books during the third quarter of 2022! We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below. Support these writers and buy their books!
Special congratulations to staff members Ada Limón who was named U.S. Poet Laureate in July, and Sharon Olds who won a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and published her new collection Balladz (Knopf), which is a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Congratulations to Karen Joy Fowler whose novel Booth made the Booker Prize Long-List, and to Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, whose new novel On the Rooftop was named a Reese’s Book Club Pick.
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
Poems, photocopiers, poetry elves, vegan muffins, handmade tablecloths, softball games, nature walks past roaring snowmelt waterfalls, quaking aspen trees, a live-streamed Benefit Poetry Reading, boxes and boxes of manuscripts, masks! masks! masks!, wild flower-festooned pinecones, the Paul Radin Memorial Dream Wagon, musicians, shade tents and buckets of sand, a dock at Lake Tahoe, recitations under the stars, a staged reading! What a joy it was to return to our beautiful valley in person.
This year in particular stood out among many wonderful sessions. In addition to it being our first year back in the Valley in three years, the joy of being together again in person in this beautiful place, the high caliber of the work, and the deep commitment to community, made this session particularly memorable.
We are grateful to our generous teaching staff members in Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction who make the summer workshops an unforgettable and productive experience. Thanks to our program directors: Lisa Alvarez, Michael Carlisle, Sands Hall, Brenda Hillman, and Louis B. Jones. And thanks in particular to Sands for her leadership and for organizing the fabulous Follies! Thanks as well to Gary Giddens, husband of participant Beth Giddens, who skillfully ran the sound for the Follies.
Our Special Guests deserve a shout out for the gift of their presence in the Valley: Meg Waite Clayton, Frances Dinkelspiel, Karen Joy Fowler, Andrew Nicholls, Kris O’Shee, Julia Flynn Siler, Jordan Fisher Smith, Caridwen Irvine Spatz, Amy Tan and Dora Wang, who, as a physician, served as an unofficial advice-giver and comfort regarding all things COVID.
Patricia K. Meyer and Megan Fay Raveneau joined us again this summer to teach their special class “The Alchemy of Adaptation.” A big thank you to Diana Fuller, who founded and shepherded this program from a full screenwriting program to an adaptation program for fiction and nonfiction writers.
Andrew Tonkovich was essential every step of the way: from the management of all the manuscripts during registration, to moderating panels, he was central to it all.
We mourned the loss of one of our beloved friends this summer: Al Young. Many thanks to Lisa Alvarez for organizing the event, as well as Andrew Tonkovich and Louis B. Jones for their tributes, and thanks to longtime participant and friend of the community Joe Heinrich, whose tribute was read by fellow participant and boy-camper of the week, Jordan Brown.
Many thanks to Ashlyn Hardie, Katherine Plocharzyk and L Tonkovich, who worked our pop-up bookstore in the Dream Wagon during the Poetry and Writers Workshops weeks. Thanks to our friend Siig of Tahoe Art Haus and Cinema for helping us move the Dream Wagon. And thanks to Dashiell Jones and Kat Feiling for creating a bit of home in our humble snack bar. And thanks to Kaitlin Klaussen and Audrey Rawson for help with housing and registration day!
Our Elves (and all-around helpers) were Kat Feiling, Antonia Fuller, Lindsey Gordon, Ashlyn Hardie, Dashiell Jones, Michaela Korn, Katherine Plocharzyk, and L Tonkovich. With high energy and good spirits, they all made things happen seamlessly.
L helped us record events and will soon be putting them on our website as podcasts. Lindsey, Hunter and Eva organized the Poetry Picnic this year at Skylandia Beach, with help from all the elves.
A big thank you to all of our work-waivers, especially Gauri Awasthi, Luz Casquejo Johnston, Loisa Fenichell, Katarina Lapoll, Natasha Rao, Mark Spero, and Martha Yates for their help all week.
The Benefit Poetry Reading took place in Olympic Valley in June, on the Thursday evening during Poetry Week, and many thanks are in order, to Hunter Jones who made real my hope to create our first-ever live-streamed benefit. Sands Hall who emceed the event, as well as the seven participating poets: Camille Dungy, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Major Jackson, Ada Limón, Sharon Olds and Matthew Zapruder. A heartfelt thanks especially to Jared and Julia Drake of Wildbound Media for all of their brilliant work producing the event and immersing our virtual audience in our mountain community. To view the video, click here. Thanks as well to our sponsors of this event: Tahoe Art Haus and Cinema, Word After Word Books, and PUBS WHO DONATED!! This event benefits our Poetry Scholarship Fund, which we look to expand each year in the face of rising costs. We have tremendous gratitude to everyone who came to the event in person or online to support this project. Donations welcome.
We were delighted to welcome back published alums to read from their new work: Caroline Frost, Gail Reitano, Katherine Seligman. Thank you for making the trek out here to share your work with us!
Due to last minute, COVID-related staff cancelations, we would like to thank all of the Writers Workshop teaching staff who stepped in and volunteered to cover gaps in the schedule of events and workshop schedule, in order to create a seamless experience for our participants. You know who you are! Special thanks to Karen Joy Fowler for stepping in to give a brilliant Opening Talk, Rachel Howard who drove up from Nevada City to lead a morning workshop, and to Amy Tan who stepped in at the last minute and gave a stunning reading from her book Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir.
We would like to acknowledge our friends who have been tremendously generous with their time and local support over the years: Mimi Miller, Eddy & Osvaldo Ancinas, and Amy Tan & Lou Demattei. Thanks also to alum and friend Bob Austin for his generous wine donation.
Many thanks to the Board of Directors: a person in my position couldn’t ask for a more responsive, generous and wise Board, especially president Carlin Naify. Thanks as well to board members Jim Naify, Nancy and Fred Teichert, and Julia Flynn Siler, for digging in and helping with various events. Deep gratitude to our literary committee led by board vice president Alex Espinoza, along with Lisa Alvarez, Dana Johnson, Louis B. Jones, Michelle Latiolais, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, and Oscar Villalon, for helping us create a more inclusive and responsive community.
I want to thank my year-round colleagues Hunter Jones and Eva Melas who did so much to make these workshops shine. As well as her usual duties, Eva managed our pop-up bookshop as well as deftly organizing the lodging for all the participants and staff. Hunter took on a myriad of roles too numerous to name but which included planning for our first-ever pandemic onsite conference and all that entails including safe and pleasant outdoor spaces, sound system, creating the hybrid benefit event, and so much more. They deserve a restful vacation soon!
We are deeply grateful to our participants and staff. You showed respect and care for one another by following our COVID protocols. We are so glad to have had a safe and healthy summer. We want to thank you for your patience through all the site challenges; from ski-area construction noise to wildfire smoke to windblown roaming tents and, in June, rain and snowfall—all of you made these workshops memorable through your warmth and good will. We at the Community of Writers can only do so much to create the circumstances of a good workshop session, but ultimately it is our teaching staff and participants who make the week so wonderful.
And to our Donors: What a community this is! Your support is essential to this thing we do.
With love and gratitude,
-Brett Hall Jones
Executive Director
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alum and teaching staff who have published books during the first quarter of 2022! We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below. Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
Spring has sprung. Workshop applications are in, taxes filed, boosters available, wildflowers abloom, and the new OGQ…live. This issue of our online Community of Writers journal presents some of the best recent prose and poetry by alums, offered in celebration of their most recent publications. Do check out their full bios and by all means do purchase their work.
Meanwhile, award-winning short story writer Mary Kuryla shares a chapter from her newest, a debut novel. Poet Lester Graves Lennon memorializes state-sanctioned racist murder but also the life of our own Community of Writers legend Lucille Clifton: “Oceans remember,” indeed! Novelist Rhoda Huffey gamely engages her wild dreamlife, laugh-out-loud creative insights into perhaps the writing of her 31 Paradiso. Patricia Dunn considers the inspiration, perspective, and timing required to grow as a writer, with a shout-out to activist-writer hero Grace Paley herself. Poet and anthology editor Emily Perez meditates on what’s required to assemble an anthology on motherhood, a standout collection which features, happily, many Community of Writers alums! Author and activist Ellen Bravo delivers one of many real-life episodes of struggle included in her decades-spanning survey of American peace, justice and labor rights organizing, Standing Up: Tales of Struggle.
We offer hearty congratulations to all as we struggle, together, to affirm, create, and realize the best of our collective imaginings and re-imaginings.
Andrew Tonkovich
Editor, OGQ
Congratulations to these Community of Writers alum and teaching staff who have published books during the fourth quarter of 2021! We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below. Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
Online, and year-round, The Writers’ Annex will be made up of short courses, seminars, workshops, and more. Our vision is to bring the creative insight and experience of our staff poets and prose writers to our community in all seasons, not just in the summertime, and not just here in the valley. We envision online offerings which might address such topics as eco-poetics, translation, and generative sessions. Some will be one or two days, some will be weekend intensives, and some will meet weekly for a month or two.
Some of our offerings will be for writers, and others will be for readers and those who study the written word. We learned from our two years of offerings from the Virtual Valley that opportunities like this can be crucial for participants who aren’t in an academic setting, and who can’t make a week-long trip to the Sierra whether because of mobility, financial, employment, or familial constraints. We see The Writers’ Annex as a bridge for them.
Our first offering from The Writers’ Annex will be in poetry: a short course called “Reading Milosz, by Robert Hass.” Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Laureate, generally regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, produced a large and various body of work. Milosz’s friend and neighbor, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Hass, worked with him for more than twenty-five years on the translation of his poems, many of which can be found in the anthology Czesław Miłosz, New and Collected Poems, a compilation that takes us across much of the intense life of the European twentieth century, in a poetry that uses ceaselessly inventive techniques and approaches to a range of subjects. The conversation promises to be rich and enlightening with Hass as our guide.
Stay tuned as we develop more from… The Writers’ Annex. We are extremely excited to be launching this platform and to be expanding our offerings!
The fall issue of our online, in-house, invitation-only, COVID-era quarterly Community of Writers journal arrives, as you will note, with a lot of adjectival explanation. Fortunately, the writing once again lives up to the hype, with poetry and prose which runs the gamut. Running the gamut has been a marathon lately, as reflected in personal, political, meditative if reliably artful offerings from this issue’s contributors: poet David Mills, novelist Monica West and nonfiction writers Martina Clark and Kate Nason. Dear friend Kris O’Shee shares an excerpt from her memoir about life and love with longtime staffer Alan Cheuse (1940-2015), with archival photos by Brett Hall Jones and Tracy Hall. Fiction Co-Director Louis B. Jones starts us off with a seasonal report from the actual Valley. I hope you are delighted, inspired, and affirmed by exemplary work from your Community of Writers pals, whether you’ve met them in real life at the conference or not.
Andrew Tonkovich
Editor, OGQ
Congratulations to these Community of Writers Alums who have published books during the third quarter of 2021! We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below. Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
Congratulations to these Community of Writers Alums who have published books during the second quarter of 2021! We are delighted to share their success with you. You can explore these books by clicking the book cover images below. Support these writers and buy their books!
Visit our Omnium Gatherum to explore all the recent alumni news.
“The poems tell a California story and the story of the American West and American poetry,” Alvarez says. “Contributors include some of the country’s most acclaimed poets, along with those just starting out, each with something to say about where and how we live together.”
“The poets in the (Poetry) program are being celebrated in a new anthology published by Heyday Books: Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. The title comes from a poem by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell, who directed the Poetry Program for 17 years: “Then why to these rocks/ Do I keep coming back why.”
We’re delighted to announce two new poetry readings to celebrate the publication of our 50th anniversary poetry anthology, Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers.
• April 11: At the Sierra Poetry Festival online. More details
• April 16: At Skylight Books reading series online. More details.
The Community of Writers celebrates fifty years of its annual poetry workshop with an extraordinary collection by some of the country’s most prominent contemporary poets. “Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers” includes over 140 poems inspired by or written in High Sierra during the annual workshop week. Read more.
Sunday, April 11 | 11:30 AM (Pacific)
The Community of Writers will join the Sierra Poetry Festival online for a virtual poetry reading for Heyday’s release of Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers.
Introduced by: Lisa D. Alvarez, the anthology’s editor.
Both teaching staff poets and alumni poets of the storied annual summer Poetry Workshops of the Community of Writers will read from the first section of the anthology, “Poems about Place.” In addition to reading from their own work, each featured poet will also select another poem to read. Although the place where these poems were first written unifies these poems, they are as varied and distinctive in their lyricism, voice, and scope as the watershed of the Sierra itself.
Join Chris Davidson, Christina Hutchins, Patricia Spears Jones, Francisco Márquez, Sharon Olds, Maw Shein Win, and Matthew Zapruder for another celebration of the publication of this extraordinary anthology, as they read and discuss poems first written during the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop.
Wednesday, April 21 | 6:30 PM (Pacific)
Virtual event on Crowdcast. Registrants will be sent a Crowdcast link upon registration.
The Community of Writers will join SkyLight Books online for a virtual poetry reading for Heyday’s release of Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. The evening will celebrate fifty years of poetry written during the Poetry Workshop in the High Sierra.
Emcee: Lisa D. Alvarez, the project’s editor.
Join Francisco Aragón, Joan Baranow, Katie Ford, Jay A. Fernandez, Lester Graves Lennon, Michelle Brittan Rosado, Vickie Vértiz, Sholeh Wolpé, and Charles Harper Webb for another celebration of the publication of this extraordinary anthology, as they read and discuss poems first written during the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop.
The Community of Writers turns 50 this year. A new book highlights how the Olympic Valley retreat steered California’s voice.
“In late 1969, California’s literary scene was in trouble.” Two couples founded the Community of Writers to save it. In this article from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Datebook, written by Scott Thomas Anderson, read about our 50-year history and our new poetry collection from Heyday Books celebrating this milestone called Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers. Read the article here.
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce two scholarships for PEN Emerging Voices Fellows who require financial aid to attend the Community of Writers Summer Workshops this summer.
Dates:
Poetry: June 19 – 26, 2021
Fiction Workshop: July 11 – 17, 2021
Narrative Nonfiction and Memoir Workshop: August 1 – 6, 2021
Deadline to apply: March 28, 2021
Each scholarship will be for the full tuition cost of each workshop ($900 for Poetry, $880 for Fiction, and $850 for Narrative Nonfiction and Memoir).
Interested Emerging Voices Fellows will need to apply to the workshop by March 28, and request this scholarship in the application form. Fellows offered scholarships will need to submit a $100 deposit (which will be refunded on the first day of the workshop.) This is a scholarship for poets and writers who have not previously attended the Poetry Workshop.
The Community of Writers is delighted to announce three scholarships for Cave Canem Fellows who require financial aid to attend the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop this summer.
Dates: June 19 – 26, 2021
Deadline to apply: March 28, 2021
Each scholarship will be for $900, which is the full tuition to the 2021 Poetry Program.
Interested Cave Canem Fellows will need to apply to the workshop by March 28, and request this scholarship in the application form. Fellows offered scholarships will need to submit a $100 deposit (which will be refunded on the first day of the workshop.) This is a scholarship for poets who have not previously attended the Poetry Workshop.
We are delighted to announce the publication of Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2019. This annual anthology is made up of poems first written during the 2019 Poetry Workshop, and is available now! Proceeds benefit the Poetry Workshop’s Scholarship Fund.Each June at the Community of Writers, poets gather in the Sierras to write and share their new work. Participants and teaching staff poets alike write a poem each day and then bring their new draft to workshop the next morning. Written Here: The Community of Writers Poetry Review 2019 is an impressive collection of all of the extraordinary poetry to come out of the 2019 Poetry Workshop. Once again, volunteer editors, alumni from the same annual workshop, sort through all of the participant submissions and select the poems that appear in the Review. The 2019 Poetry staff featured Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, David Tomas Martinez, Jane Miller, Sharon Olds, and Gregory Pardlo, with special guest Robert Hass. This edition of Written Here was edited by Veronica Corpuz, Jeanne Morel, Jon Riccio, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, and Leah Xue. Many thanks to Cody Gates and Maureen Forys at Happenstance Type-O-Rama for the beautiful book design and production.
Threa Almontaser • Laura Atkinson • Kyce Bello • Ambriel Floyd Bostic • Robin Burrows • Brian Carey Chung • Nate Clute • Veronica Corpuz • Beth Ford • Kirk Glaser • Katy Gurin • Ken Haas • J.J. Hernandez • Ethan Heusser • Brenda Hillman • John Hines • Leslieann Hobayan • Lauren Howard • Danny Kraft • Deborah Krainin • Lester Graves Lennon • Helena Li • Sarah Maclay • Holaday Mason • Jane Miller • Matthew Moniz • Jeanne Morel • Julie Murphy • Sharon Olds • Emilie Osborn • Jessica Reed • Jon Riccio • Yiskah Rosenfeld • Gini Savage • Diane Schenker • Richard Sime • Arthur Solway • Benjamin Voigt • Lisa Wenzel • Roberta Werdinger • Amelia L. Williams • Mary Winegarden
In this issue, we present an essay from one of our Community’s legends, the much-esteemed late novelist and journalist Robert Stone. It’s an excerpt from a just-released collection of his nonfiction. Longtime member Molly Fisk shares two poems, one each from two anthologies she’s featured in, one of which she edited. Leland Cheuk makes us all smarter and less America-centric with a journal of his recent internationlist reading. And, finally, we feature two gorgeous fictions from recent participants on the way up. Lyndsey Ellis‘s short story is a musically-structured experiment in association and observation by a mortuary technician. Her novel arrives next year. Elison Alcovendaz offers a poignant story of quotidian loss and emotional discovery.
We’re also pleased to announce the inaugural episode of Conversations from the Virtual Valley, our new series featuring author interviews, readings and panels. Our first features Michelle Latiolais in conversation with Ryan Ridge.
Conversations from the Virtual Valley is hosted by Andrew Tonkovich and produced by Laura Howard.
To get the next issue sent directly to your inbox, subscribe today.
Events are on the Zoom platform.
Ticket reservations will close one hour before the event. Reserve early.
Ticket reservations will close one hour before the event. Reserve early.
Even if you don’t plan on adapting your novel into a dramatic work, learning the skills vital to a screenwriter—writing visually vivid and emotional scenes; creating structure that invisibly marries plot to character development; revealing character through action; advancing connected themes; creating organic twists; creating a sense of urgency; creating a sensory, memorable world with the kinds tensions that reveal character — are useful skills for every writer
These readings are presented to the public as part of our first-ever Fiction workshop held entirely online.
These readings are free to attend. Donations needed and welcome.
Do you have a forthcoming publication? Send us your news, and and we will post it in our Omnium Gatherum: Alumni News. And if your news is a book publication, we’ll include it in our next quarterly 2020 New Alumni Books Update here.
In this issue, Robin Romm gives us her previously unpublished recent Community of Writers craft talk, to instruct and amuse. In three poems, Danusha Laméris esteems both beauty and pain, with simultaneous dignity, humor and wild enthusiasm. Ted Fowler offers vulnerability and empathy in an elegantly precise chapter from a loving memoir of his late wife. (Watch for the small plane at its conclusion!) Finally, fiction fabulist Ryan Ridge leads a smart, darkly funny romp through real and unreal worlds of social, literary and political imagination.
The Poetry Workshop is founded on the belief that when poets gather in a community to write new poems, each poet may well break through old habits and write something stronger and truer than before. The idea is to try to expand the boundaries of what one can write. In the mornings we meet to read to each other the work of the previous twenty-four hours, and in the late afternoons we gather for a conversation about some aspect of craft.On several afternoons staff poets hold brief individual conferences. Director: Robert Hass.
More program details, bios, logistics, and application form:
Do you have a forthcoming publication? Send us your news, and and we will post it in our Omnium Gatherum: Alumni News. And if your news is a book publication, we’ll include it in our next quarterly 2020 New Alumni Books Update here.
After a long delay, we have finally uploaded images from the 2019 Benefit Poetry Reading. The Benefit was held in Grass Valley at the historic Saint Joseph’s Cultural Center on June 21 to an overflowing and enthusiastic crowd.
The 2019 Benefit Reading featured poets Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, David Tomas Martinez, Jane Miller, Sharon Olds, and Gregory Pardlo, emcee Maxima Kahn, and were welcomed by Judy Crowe.
The Benefit Reading is held every year on the night before the Poetry Workshop in Squaw Valley to raise important funds for the Community of Writers Scholarship Fund for Poets.
Many thanks to the coordinator Eva Melas, as well as YubaLit’s Rachel Howard, and all the volunteers who made the event such as success.
Special thanks to Adrian Schneider for the photographs! You can view more of his work on his website: Adrian Schneider Photograhy.
2019’s Summer Workshops and events were a tremendous success.
Poems, photocopiers, poetry elves, vegan muffins, handmade tablecloths, softball games, nature walks past roaring snowmelt waterfalls, quaking aspen trees, anthologies, manuscripts, festooned pinecones, the Paul Radin Memorial Dream Wagon, music and the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates and her brilliant reading of her story “Assassin!”
This year in particular stood out among many wonderful sessions. The high caliber of the work, and the deep commitment to community, made this session particularly memorable.
We are grateful to our generous teaching staff members in Poetry, Fiction and Nonfiction who make the summer workshops an unforgettable and productive experience. And in particular I want to thank our program directors: Lisa Alvarez, Michael Carlisle, Brenda Hillman, Diana Fuller, and Louis B. Jones. And thanks to Sands Hall for her leadership and for organizing the fabulous Follies!
And thanks to our Special Guests for the gift of their presence in the Valley: Daniel Halpern, Robert Hass, Michelle Latoiolas, Joyce Carol Oates, and Amy Tan.
Patricia K. Meyer joined us in the valley again this summer to teach her special class “The Alchemy of Adaptation.” A big thank you to Diana Fuller, who founded and shepherded this program from a full screenwriting program to an adaptation program for fiction and nonfiction writers. Thanks to Whitney Fuller and Christopher Upham for taking wonderful photographs. Thanks to Chris, also, for his technical support.
We mourned the loss of two of our beloved friends this summer: Burnett Miller and Tom Rickman. Many thanks to poet Gary Short for his moving comments about Burnett. And thanks to our friends Diana Fuller and Patricia K. Meyer for helping us to celebrate Tom’s life and history with the Community of Writers. We were so pleased and honored to be joined by the families of Burnett and Tom.
We are deeply grateful to the Capital Public Radio’s generous and remarkable Beth Ruyak for leading panels and interviews during our Writers Workshop week.
Heaps of gratitude again to Andrew Tonkovich, who was essential every step of the way: from the management of all the manuscripts during registration, to moderating panels, he was central to it all. He is also invaluable as we work toward celebrating our 50th Anniversary.
A big thank you to Julia Flynn Siler and Charlie Siler for all of their work on the 50th Anniversary Oral History Project, including interviewing longtime staff members and filming panels and readings, videotaping them and making them available to us as we move into our 50th year.
We are grateful for the outstanding work done by Kaitlin Klaussen coordinating our participant and staff housing. Many thanks to Livia Keene, who worked our pop-up bookstore in the Dream Wagon during the Poetry Program. Thanks also to Lindsey Gordon and Tracy Hall for documenting the goings-on with their cameras (including the photos here). And thanks to Tracy, Dashiell Jones, and Kat Feiling, for creating a bit of home in our humble snack bar.
Our Elves (and all-around helpers) were Jesse Bedayn, Kat Feiling, Lindsey Gordon, Sean Hamilton, Jesse Israel, Dashiell Jones, Hunter Jones, Remy Mickelson, Livia Keene, Audrey Rawson, and Louis Tonkovich. With high energy and good spirits, they all made things happen seamlessly. Special thanks to Eva Melas for the myriad of projects she managed. We would be lost without her. Details below.
Hunter and Dashiell helped us record events and will soon be putting them on our website as podcasts. Eva organized the Poetry Picnic this year at Meeks Bay along with the help of Lindsey Gordon and Hunter Jones. Indispensable also at the Poetry Picnic was our grill-master Leslie Hobayan who barbecued with confidence and good humor. A big thank you to all of our work-waivers Matthew Moniz, Andrew Dally, Nathan Cheng, Brian Chung, Benjamin Voigt, and Jennifer Steinorth for their help all week. Thanks to Karen Terrey for helping with local publicity. And a special thanks to Poetry program work-waiver Nicholas Nichols for documenting the week through his lens.
The Benefit Poetry Reading took place in Grass Valley in June and many thanks are in order, especially to Maxima Kahn who emceed the event, Judy Crowe who introduced the event, as well as the seven participating poets: Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, David Tomas Martinez, Jane Miller, Sharon Olds and Gregory Pardlo.
Special thanks to the Event Coordinator Eva Melas who, with the brilliant help of Rachel Howard at YubaLit, and Don Rogers (publisher of the Grass Valley Union Newspaper) were instrumental in making sure we had a robust audience in such a small town. Thanks so much to our sponsors Grass Valley Courtyard Suites, YubaLit, and Nevada County Arts Council. Thanks to Copper Canyon Press, New Directions Press, Sarabande Books, and Wesleyan University Press for donating books.Thanks to our enthusiastic volunteers: Lindsey Gordon, Lisa Malsam, Emily Malsam & Michael Melas, Lydia & Jim Seely, and Mary Vogt. And special thanks to our friend Tom Taylor (lights and sound) who climbed a terrifying ladder to set the lights for the event. Thanks to Adrian Schneider for his wonderful photos. Elias Funez (Union Newspaper) also took some terrific photos from that night.
We would like to acknowledge our friends who have been tremendously generous with their time and local support over the years: Mimi Miller, Eddy & Osvaldo Ancinas, and Amy Tan & Lou Demattei. Thanks also to alum and friend Bob Austin for his generous wine donation. Thanks also to Ben Preston for being so helpful with our conference move, and for his masterful management of the sound during the Follies.
Many thanks to the Board of Directors: a person in my position couldn’t ask for a more responsive, generous and wise Board, especially president Jim Naify. I am grateful to our Events Committee (Carlin Naify, Nancy Teichert and Ruth Blank) who made great things happen during the programs. Special thanks this year to my comrades Michael Carlisle and Michelle Latiolais, who are always there with advice, support and friendship. This year we welcomed one new Board Member: poetry workshop alum Ken Haas.
And to our Donors: What a community this is! Your support is essential to this thing we do.
With love and gratitude,
-Brett Hall Jones
Executive Director
Click on the author portraits to learn about these poets and their work. Or View as List
