2019

SPC 40th Anniversary Spring Conference 

Saturday, April 6, 9:30 am – 5 pm

Our annual conference is a full day of workshops and readings with guests, local poets, and a chance to form connections with writers in the community. Lunch is provided as well as lite fair and coffee to start. 

**All Of Our Amazing Conference Faculty and Local Authors Will Have Books For Sale!** Faculty & Featured Local Authors Will Sign Books at Their Respective Afternoon Readings

The Book Table is will be open for the duration of this event, open 9:30 am – 5:00 pm.

The Schedule Of Events

9:00 to 10:00
Registration; Coffee and Pastries ~ SPC Main Room
9:30 to 9:45
Conference Welcome ~ California Stage

10:00 to 11:15
Choose Your Workshop!

Mary Mackey     Creativity: Finding Sources of Inspiration for Your Poems
OR
Maya Khosla     Where We Begin After Fire

11:30 to 12:45
Choose Your Workshop!

Joshua McKinney   Retweet, Reshare, Refrain: Form and the Conversations of Our Time
OR
Katie Peterson   The Doll and The Breadcrumb: Poems from Stories and Stories in Poems

12:45 Lunch Provided!

1:30 pm

Hot Off The Press: Celebrating New Work from Local Authors, Presses and Magazines Reading and Book Signing in California Stage

Stuart Canton reads from his chapbook, A Field Guide for the Coming Extinction, published by Little M Press

River Rock Books Katie McCleary and Jan Haag present Seaworthy by Marie Reynolds

Levee Magazine shares new poetry, presented by Samantha Daniels and Eric Orosco

Random Lane Press presents Lawrence DinkinsWarrior Poet, his first full-length poetry collection

Join Lisa Dominguez Abraham in celebrating Coyote Logic, her first full-length poetry collection

2:30 to 3:45
Choose Your Workshop!

Brad Buchanan   Writing as a Self-Healing Art
OR
Mai Der Vang      Beauty Behind the Burden:Navigating Eras of Trauma Through Poetry 

4:00 to 5:00
Faculty Reading, Book Signing and Conference Farewell in California Stage

2018

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

2017

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2008

2007

SPC Writers’ Conference 2007
All events at 1719 25th Street, Sacramento

April 20 – Friday night reading and reception 7-9pm
Heather Hutcheson, Andy Jones, Danny Romero, Brad Henderson.
Free to the public

April 21 – Saturday workshops 9am to 4pm
$35 conference fee for all day Saturday
8:30 – 9:00 Coffee and muffins

9:00 – 9:45 Panel Discussion –
Andy Jones, Camille Norton, Gail Entrekin, Danny Romero

10:00 – 11:45 Small workshop sessions:
Andy Jones/Brad Henderson
Gail Entrekin – “The Taste of Poetry”
Camille Norton – “The Muse of History: Writing the Past into the Present.”
Heather Hutcheson – “Where Poems Begin”
Tim Kahl – “The Speaking Voice as Poetic Tool”

12:00 – 1:00 Lunch break

1:00 – 1:20 X – Sac City Ethnic Theatre Workshop)

1:30 – 2:45 Afternoon workshop sessions
Danny Romero – Writing Memoir
Angela Dee Alforque – Performing Spoken Word

3:00 – 4:00
Participants group reading and celebration.

SPC Writers’ Conference Presenters

Angela Dee Alforque is an assistant professor at Sacramento City College, and is the director of !X – the Sac City Ethnic Theater Workshop. Angela also serves on the Academic Senate at SCC. She received her MA from CSU Sacramento in Multi-Cultural American History & Performance.

Gail Rudd Entrekin teaches English and creative writing at Sierra College in Grass Valley. Her collections of poems include Change (Will Do You Good), from Poetic Matrix Press, which was nominated for the California Book Awards, You Notice the Body (Hip Pocket Press, 1998), and John Danced (Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press, 1984). Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press since 2000, she is also editor of the web page Women’s Writing Salon at www.nevadacountyartscouncil.org and producer of the Women’s Writing Salon reading series at Jason’s in Grass Valley.

Heather Hutcheson earned a BA in English from UC Davis and an MA in Creative Writing from CSU Sacramento. Her master’s project was a book-length collection of poetry, Risk Poetry. Heather spends the majority of her time outside of the classroom working to promote the arts in Sacramento. She teaches creative writing workshops for families, and, for nine years, she volunteered as the Managing Editor ofPoetry Now, a monthly poetry publication. Heather has had her fiction and non-fiction published nationally and has won several awards for her poetry.

Brad Henderson (AKA, beau hamel) has published his poetry and fiction in Dominion Review, Blue Unicorn, Hayden’s Ferry Review, California Quarterly, and other journals. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of Southern California, and is the author the Phi Kappa Phi Award winning novel, Drums, (John Daniel/Fithian Press 1997) and the dual chapbook of poetry, Split Stock, (Natsoulas Press 2006), co-written with Andy Jones. Henderson currently teaches writing full-time at University of California, Davis. He is co-editor of the forthcoming poetry anthology, Disturbing Minds: Poems of Desire & Desire [2008] with a foreword by Dana Gioia. He is also one of the co-founders of UC Davis’ new critical-poetic school of “literary hauntedness.” Brad recently completed the manuscript for his second book of poetry, Secret Cowboy at the Raw Bar, which explores addiction-ism, as well as “the American Dream” and “the American West” as tainted modern myths.

Andy Jones teaches writing and literature classes at UC Davis. Andy also serves on the Campus Media Board and acts as Faculty Advisor to The Voice, the Undergraduate Medical Journal at UC Davis. His radio show “Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour” airs on KDVS, 90.3 FM, Wednesday afternoons at 5pm. In February, 2006, John Natsoulas Press published Andy’s book of poems Split Stock, which was co-authored with Brad Henderson.

Tim Kahl’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, American Letters & Commentary, Berkeley Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Limestone, Nimrod, South Dakota Quarterly, The Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and dozens of other journals in the U.S. He has translated Austrian avant-gardist, Friederike Mayröcker; Brazilian poet, Lêdo Ivo; and the poems of the Portuguese language’s only Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. He also appears as Victor Schnickelfritz at the poetry and poetics blog The Great American Pinup (http://greatamericanpinup.blogspot.com/). His first collection entitled Possessing Yourself is forthcoming from Word Tech Press.

Camille Norton‘s book Corruption, was published by Harper Collins in 2005 and was the winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series Open Competition. She is Professor of English at The University of the Pacific, Stockton.Paragraph

Danny Romero is the author of the novel Calle 10 (Mercury House). He teaches in the English Department at Sacramento City College.