At 3:00 there will be a brief reading (roughly 12-15 minutes each) for all of the conference presenters which will last until roughly 4:30
Salgado Maranhão has two books published in this country: Blood of the Sun (Milkweed Editions, 2012) andTiger Fur (White Pine Press, 2015). He has an unusual life history, rising from rural impoverishment and illiteracy (to the age of 15) in the drought-ridden nordest to a position as the leading poet of his generation in Brazil.
Alexis Levitin has been a translator of Brazilian poetry for almost forty years (with forty published books in translation). During the last decade, he has been working principally with Salgado Maranhão, an Afro-Brazilian poet who has won all the major poetry awards offered in his country: the Jabuti, the Poetry Prize from the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the Poetry Prize from the Brazilian PEN Club, and first prize from the Brazilian Writers Union. Back in 2012, Maranhão and Levitin did a reading tour of the USA, presenting at fifty-two institutions, from Harvard, Dartmouth and Yale to Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and on to Texas Tech and Birmingham Southern. This year their West Coast tour will include stops at Stanford, Mills College, University of Oregon, University of Washington and others.
In addition to being a fiddler (with nine CDs), Ken Waldman is a former college professor with an MFA in Creative Writing. He has six full-length poetry collections, a memoir (about his life as a touring artist), a children’s book, and over 400 of his stories and poems have appeared in such journals as Poet Lore, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Quarterly West. www.kenwaldman.com
Susan Gubernat’s first book of poems, Flesh (Helicon Nine Editions),won the Marianne Moore Prize; the chapbook Analog House, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gargoyle, Michigan Quarterly, The Pinch, Prairie Schooner, and Pleiades, among others. An opera librettist, she is a Professor at Cal State East Bay, where she advises the Arroyo Literary Review. She received her MFA in poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including artist’s grants from the states of New Jersey and New York, and residences at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Sally Ashton is the author of Some Odd Afternoon, Her Name Is Juanita, and These Metallic Days. She is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art. Honors include a fellowship from Arts Council Silicon Valley and a residency at Montalvo Arts Center. She served as Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County, 2011-2013. Ashton earned her MFA at Bennington Writing Seminars. She teaches at San José State University and has taught a variety of workshops including inDisquiet: International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) and The String of Islands (Dink, 2015). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters’ Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.wordpress.com/) and the poetry video blog Linebreak Studios [http://linebreakstudios.blogspot.com/]. He is also editor of Bald Trickster Press and Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth} [http://www.flickr.com/photos/rickele/11129585563/] [http://www.sacmetroarts.org/documents/FullPoems.pdf] He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento.
