Correspondences: A Collaboration

What corresponds? What doesn’t, but should? What happens when correspondence turns to collaboration, and what’s bred from its absence? Come out to hear these writers respond to these questions through their collaborations and individual poems.

Hosts: The Bay Area Correspondence School and Lone Glen

About the Authors:

Mary-Kim Arnold is the author of Litany for the Long Moment (Essay Press, 2018) and the chapbook Between Night & Night (Artifact Press, 2018). Her poetry collection, The Fish & The Dove is forthcoming (Noemi Press, 2020). She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.

MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis, and Dear Animal, (Nomadic Press.) Chavez was a recipient of a 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for poetry and in the same year, her poem “The New White House, Finding Myself Among the Ruins” was selected by Eileen Myles for the Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize. In 2018 Alley Cats Books published her lyric essay, A Brief History of the Selfie as a chapbook. She is a fellow with CantoMundo, co-founder and co-curator of the reading series Lyrics & Dirges, co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Her most recent publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomad Coffee and on Academy of American Poets, Poem-A-Day as the featured poem in December 2018.

Tiff Dressen lives in the Portola neighborhood of San Francisco. Songs from the Astral Bestiary, a (slender) full length collection of poetry emerged from lyric& Press. They are presently getting deeper and deeper into the role of Kent for a Bay Area grassroots production of King Lear. In 2019, they hope to spend more time worshipping the Vandercook proof press at the SF Center for the Book.

Miah Jeffra is author of the essay collection The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic Press, 2017) and The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (forthcoming, Sibling Rivalry Press, 2019). Awards include the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, and finalist for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Residencies include Ragdale and The Hub City Writers Project. Recent publications include The North American Review, Fourteen Hills Review, The Nervous Breakdown and Fifth Wednesday. Miah is founding editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press.

Michelle Ruiz Keil is a Latinx novelist and playwright with an eye for the enchanted and a way with animals. She teaches writing with a focus on fairytale, divination, and archetype and curates All Kinds of Fur: A Fairytale Reading Series and Salon in Portland, Oregon. She has been a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Lit Camp. Her published short fiction can be found in Cosmonauts Avenue and the forthcoming anthology Color Outside The Lines. Her debut novel All of Us with Wings comes out June 18th from Soho Teen.

Alexandra Mattraw’s first book of poems, small siren, is available at Cultural Society (2018), and her second book is forthcoming from Cultural Society in early 2020. She is also the author of four chapbooks, including flood psalm (2017, Dancing Girl Press). A Bay Area Correspondence School member, her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Fourteen Hills, Jacket2, Interim, The Poetry Project, and VOLT. In Oakland and San Francisco, Alexandra curates an art-centric writing and performance series called Lone Glen, now in its eighth year.

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of Lizard (Chax Press, 2016), Manhatten (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2009), and several chapbooks, including The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow, a collaboration with poet Valerie Witte (forthcoming from The Operating System). Rosenthal edited A Community Writing Itself: Conversations with Vanguard Poets of the Bay Area (Dalkey Archive, 2010). She is the recipient of grant-supported writing residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain, Ragdale, New York Mills, Hambidge, and This Will Take Time. From 2009–2011 she was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. She lives in San Francisco where she works as a Life & Professional Coach and serves on the California Book Awards poetry jury. More at sarahrosenthal.net and sculptingmylife.com.

Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist –writer, dancer, and painter– and the author of Premonitions (Wayne State University Press). She illustrates essays for The Rumpus, has taught writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and worked in digital development at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. She is currently working as Shamel Pitts’ Marketing and Campaign Manager.

Amos White is an American haiku poet and author of The Sound of the Web: Haiku and Poetry on Facebook and Twitter, recognized for his vivid imagery and breathless interpretations. He was a Finalist in the NPR National Cherry Blossom Haiku Contest 2013 and has works published in The Wittenberg Review, Oakland Review, Bones Journal, San Francisco BayView, Area 17, World Haiku Association Anthology. Amos serves on several literary and arts nonprofit boards, is president of the Bay Area Generations series, and Founder and Producer of Beyond Words: Jazz+Poetry show at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley.

Jessica Wickens is a founding editor of Monday Night and co-author of Everything Reused in the Sea: The Crow and Benjamin Letters. Her chapbook, Things That Trust Us, was recently published by Beard of Bees. She lives in Richmond, CA.

Valerie Witte is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish Books) and three chapbooks, most recently The Grass Is Greener When the Sun Is Yellow (forthcoming from the Operating System), a collaboration with Sarah Rosenthal. She has been the recipient of residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences; La Porte Peinte in Noyers, France; and Ragdale Foundation. She is a founding member of the Bay Area Correspondence School and, in her daytime hours, edits books in Portland. Learn more at valeriewitte.com.

Jane Wong’s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, Third Coast, jubilat and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.