Poetry as Sanctuary w/ Rebecca Foust + Javier Zamora

Marin Poet Laureate Rebecca Foust and fellow poet Javier Zamora are offering an evening of their poetry reading poems that touch on the theme of Sanctuary. They will also share poems from their most recent books: Foust’s Paradise Drive, winner of the 2015 Press 53 Poetry Prize for Poetry and Zamora’s, Unaccompanied, out in October from Copper Canyon Press.

REBECCA FOUST  has published five books of poetry, most recently Paradise Drive (Press 53 2015), sonnets featuring a modern-day Pilgrim living in Marin County, reviewed in the Marin Independent Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and Rumpus in the Bay Area and in national venues including the Harvard review, Huffington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Washington Review of Books. Recent recognitions include the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield, the American Literary Review Fiction Award, and fellowships from the Frost Place, MacDowell, Sewanee, and West Chester Poetry Conference. Foust is the new Marin County Poet Laureate, the Poetry Editor for Women’s Voices for Change and has been a board member at Marin Poetry Center since 2008.

Foust’s Marin County Poet Laureate project, “Poetry as Sanctuary,” ties in with California’s status as a Sanctuary State, and of it Foust says “poetry is a sacred space—church, a hospital, a hospice bed—offering a safe place for our most private, urgent, and otherwise ineffable expressions. Reading and writing it opens an escape from technology, stress, life-overload, grief, and other emotional pain. Perhaps the most important service poetry can provide now is respite from or way to respond to current political events. Poetry can build community, and I’d like to use it to raise the awareness and empathy for what is at stake under the new Administration for our undocumented immigrant population here in Marin.” Foust hopes to plan community read-arounds on political themes and readings featuring immigrant poets in the County libraries.”

JAVIER ZAMORA was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and the 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writer’s Award, his first poetry collection Unaccompanied is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press September 2017.