Sacramento Poetry Center 2018 Spring Conference
9:00 to 10:00 – Registration; Coffee and Pastries ~ Main SPC Room
9:30 to 9:45 – Conference Welcome ~ Main SPC Room
10:00 to 11:15 – Choose Your Workshop!
Poetry: The Collaborative Art of Solitude, with William O’Daly
This workshop will explore the necessity and inevitability of collaboration in the poet’s solitude, and
qualities of poetry that make it a dynamic and open “field of composition.” We’ll address poetry as the
transformative force that translates objects, thought, and emotion into evolving matter and, in turn,
composes our lives and our internal and external communities. In part, these connections will be celebrated
as “tones given off by the heart,” which break ground and form us as artists who render our work in the
rhythm of immersion and isolation.
William O’Daly co-founded Copper Canyon Press. His published works include eight books of translation
of the poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden,
The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day, and World’s End), and Neruda’s
first volume, Book of Twilight—all published by Copper Canyon. Chapbooks of his own poems include The
Whale in the Web (Copper Canyon), The Road to Isla Negra and Waterways (a collaboration with JS Graustein)
published by Folded Word Press. Another chapbook, Yarrow and Smoke, is forthcoming from Folded Word
in the spring of 2018.
OR
Thinking Like a Poetry Editor: How to Self-Edit a Poetry Manuscript, with April Ossmann
April Ossmann will discuss how to self-edit a poetry manuscript for submission to presses. Topics will
include poem inclusion/exclusion, ordering strategies, line editing tips, titling, and formatting decisions:
epigraphs, prologues, epilogues, dedications, acknowledgments, and notes. She will discuss submission do’s
and don’ts, cover letters, contests, manuscript ordering, common reasons for rejection, and how to know
when a manuscript is publication-ready. There will be time for Q & A, so bring questions!
April Ossmann is the author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music (both from Four Way Books), and she
has published her work in numerous journals including New England Review, Colorado Review and Harvard
Review and in anthologies including From the Fishouse (Persea Books). She is the recipient of several awards
for her poetry, including a 2013 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Prairie Schooner Readers’
Choice Award. She was executive director of Alice James Books from 2000-2008, and left to launch her
consulting business, helping poets hoping to find a publisher (or to self-publish). She is a faculty editor for
the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College at Lake Tahoe.
11:30 to 12:45
Choose Your Workshop!
The Sense in Sound, with Cintia Santana
In this session we will attend to the sounds of poetry. How does sound mean? How do we receive and
create auditory logic? By listening to poems in English and in other languages, we’ll consider how similar
sounds found across words—both on and off the page—make meaning. We will generate new work
through various listening experiments intended to shake up our current sound habits.
Cintia Santana is the author of Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975–1995).
Santana’s poems and translations have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly
Review, Narrative, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. The recipient of Djerrassi and
CantoMundo fellowships, Santana’s work was selected for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2016, edited by
Mary Szybist. Currently, she teaches poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation
courses, at Stanford University.
OR
Storied Poetry: Narrative Techniques as Poetic Tools, with Kirk Glaser
Whether a poem tells a story or captures a fragmentary moment of being, narrative elements are often at
play. The challenge is using narrative to fuel and not smother the red-hot center of the poem, founded in
word, sound, rhythm, image, and metaphor. Studying such masters as Elizabeth Bishop, Sharon Olds, and
Terrance Hayes for ideas and inspiration, and using meditation to deepen our awareness, we will
experiment with narrative techniques to create poetry.
Kirk Glaser’s poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Nimrod, The
Threepenny Review, Catamaran, The Main Street Rag, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Cortland Review, and
elsewhere. Awards for his work include an American Academy of Poets prize, C. H. Jones National Poetry
Prize, University of California Poet Laureate Award, and Richard Eberhart Poetry Prize. He teaches writing
and literature at Santa Clara University, where he serves as faculty advisor to the Santa Clara Review, and is
co-editor of the anthology, New California Writing 2013, Heyday.
12:45 pm
Lunch (Provided)
For those interested in learning more about the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference,
Nan Cohen will hold an informal Q & A for no more than 15 minutes in the Main SPC Room at 1:40 pm.
2:00 to 3:15
Choose Your Workshop!
“Say her name!” Writing the Poetry of Witness, with Raina J. León
In this workshop, we will study the poetic work of Aracelis Girmay, Patricia Smith, and Danez Smith as an
entrance into the poetry of witness and transformation. We will the news and be guided in the spiritual and
humanizing practice necessary to write from a place of connection. At the end of the workshop, those who
are ready, will be encouraged to record and submit their poems to Black Poets Speak Out or Voluble. This
workshop is open to writers of all backgrounds and at any stage of their process.
Dr. Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American
Writers Collective, CantoMundo and Macondo, has been published widely in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.
Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols (2008), was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book
Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Boogeyman Dawn followed (2013), and in
2016, her third book, sombra: dis(locate) and her first chapbook, profeta without refuge were published. She has
received numerous fellowships and residencies and is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online
quarterly, international journal devoted to Latinx arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint
Mary’s College of California.
OR
Between the Lines: Writing Poems in Dialogue with Text and Myth, with Nan Cohen
Writing poems, we often find ourselves in dialogue—hidden, half-obscured, or open—with the texts
(myths, sagas, tales) that have formed us and our imaginative worlds. This workshop offers some
approaches to writing "between the lines" of our own foundational texts through exploratory play with
fragments from Greek myth, the Hebrew Bible and Shakespeare. No previous familiarity with any
particular text is needed, and all perspectives are welcomed.
Nan Cohen has published two poetry collections, Unfinished City (Gunpowder Press, 2017) and Rope Bridge
(Cherry Grove, 2005). Cohen’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and many
magazines and anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is Chair of English at Viewpoint School
and serves as the Poetry Program Director of the Napa Valley Writers Conference. She was a Stegner
Fellow and a Jones Lecturer in Poetry in the Stanford University Creative Writing Program. She has
received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation,
and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
3:30 to 4:30
Faculty Reading, Book Signing and Conference Farewell ~ SPC Main Room
