Contact: Isobel Schneider
(Tel: 510-981-6150)
Saturday, July 13, 2013, 3pm at the Berkeley Public Library, Central Branch, 2090 Kittredge Street, downtown Berkeley, 3rd floor Community Meeting Room
Join three energetic Berkeley poets as they offer a reading of their work, discuss the experience of participating in poetry writing groups (including their current writing group together), and answer questions you may have about writing groups. Bring your questions – or share your own experience and expertise – about how to start up a group, run it, and keep it going. Rebecca Radner, Glenn Ingersoll and Alan Bern will address such issues as why one might want to join a group at all, how to give feedback that is useful but positive, whether or not it's best to concentrate on one genre, and whether the group needs a leader. Your active participation in the discussion and Q & A is welcome. Rebecca Radner is a writer and editor who has lived in the Bay Area most of her life. She now lives in Berkeley. A volume of her poetry, What you least expect—selected poems 1980-2011, was published in 2011 by Class Action Ink. Her work has also appeared in Harvard Magazine, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, The Iowa Review, The New England Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, California Quarterly, ArtWeek, Inquiring Mind, Boston Review, What Book!? Buddha Poems from Beat to HipHop, and other publications, anthologies, and textbooks. For over twenty years she reviewed books regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle and other publications. She has given poetry readings in a number of Bay Area venues, including many libraries. Glenn Ingersoll has been writing poetry seriously since turned on to it by a California Poets-in-the-Schools class at his high school in 1982. In the years since he's had work in magazines (Seventeen, Exquisite Corpse, Carolina Quarterly) and ezines (Cortland Review, Shampoo), and has published two chapbooks, City Walks (1999) and Fact (2013). He was one of the coordinators of Poetry & Pizza in San Francisco, a reading series benefiting nonprofits. Glenn keeps two blogs, http://dareiread.blogspot.com/ and http://lovesettlement.blogspot.com/, and works for the Berkeley Public Library. Alan Bern is a Children’s Librarian at Berkeley Public’s Central Library. He has worked in public libraries in the East Bay Area for 20 years in a variety of jobs. He has published two books with Fithian Press: No no the saddest (2004) and Waterwalking in Berkeley (2007). He is currently at work on two books: one based on the theme of Sacred Mountains and the other dedicated to his parents. Alan is a performer working with the dancer, Lucinda Weaver, as PACES: dance & poetry fit to the space. Alan is also a printer and designer and collaborates with the artist Robert Woods: they work together under the imprint of Lines & Faces, http://linesandfaces.com/. For more information, please call 510-981-6148. The Central Library is open Monday, noon-8 p.m., Tuesday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m., Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., and Sunday afternoons from 1 p.m.-5 p.m. For questions and accessibility information, call 510-981-6195, TTY 510-548-1240, berkeleypubliclibrary.org.
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