Tom Centolella, Kathy Evans + Molly Giles – A Literary Evening

Thomas Centolella’s new poems register attraction, delight, expectations fulfilled and foiled, and moments of great feeling cherished and/or lamented. Employing the vividness of narrative without yielding to its linear strictures and overly familiar tonalities, many of the first-person protagonists are mysterious figures at once engaging and idiosyncratic, even outright eccentric. Often betwixt and between, neither here nor there, they are uncertain of actually getting anywhere. Almost Human documents the restive life-force incarnated in an endangered species—our own—and charts the movement of the self between spirit and human, recalling the idea, attributed to Teilhard de Chardin, that we aren’t human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.

Thomas Centolella is the author of four books of poetry. His awards include the American Book Award, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and publication in the National Poetry Series. He is also a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared widely in magazines, anthologies, and on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He has been a visiting writer at many colleges, universities and literary centers and has taught creative writing in the Bay Area for 30 years, notably at College of Marin and in private Marin workshops.

About Hunger And Sorrow F. D. Reeve, poet critic, said:

“The attitude in Hunger and Sorrow is impassioned; the voice is sophisticated; the author’s intelligence distances the introversion . . with a tone whose sweet patience endures.”

Kathy Evans, from Sausalito, California, is the author of three books of poetry. She has been published in journals and West Coast reviews, including the Alaska Review, the Atlantic Review, California Quarterly, Black Bear Review, Runes, Oberon, and most recently the Tupelo Quarterly. She teaches Creative Writing at Juvenile Hall in Marin County, the University of San Francisco, and The College of Marin. She is a poet teacher with The California Poets-in- the-Schools and is currently at UCSF as a poet- in-residence at Benioff Children’s Hospital. Her three collections of poetry include: Imagination Comes To Breakfast, As The Heart Is Held, and Hunger and Sorrow, which was a winner for the Small Press Poetry Prize.

Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction, All the Wrong Places feature nineteen strange and tightly woven tales which merge the mythic and the modern with dark humor and deep humanity. Many of the stories contain contemporary versions of ancient guides: a ghost dog seen by a young drifter in love with a much older guru; a wild goat on a cliff forever standing beside her dead ram glimpsed by a woman whose husband battles cancer; a volcano goddess with a small dog appearing to a woman whose boyfriend is flirting with her teenage daughter. The vacationland settings, Hawaii, Ireland, Baja and California among them, accentuate the characters’ sense of displacement.

Molly Giles is the author of three award-winning story collections, Rough Translations, Creek Walk, and Bothered, and a novel, Iron Shoes. Previous awards include the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Small Press Short Fiction Award, the Boston Globe Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and an NEA grant.