Wales to Bay VII

Sarah Kobrinsky and Caroline Goodwin host a virtual reading with two Bay Area poets and two poets based in Wales, UK.

Susan Cohen returned to poetry, her first love, after a long career as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and professor of journalism in the Bay Area. She earned an MFA from Pacific University in 2013, and is the author of two chapbooks and two full-length collections. Her second collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, won the 2015 David Martinson—Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press and was a runner-up for the Philip Levine Prize. Her recent poems won the Terrain.org Annual Poetry Award and second place in Cutthroat Journal’s Joy Harjo Prize competition, and also have appeared in the Catamaran Literary Reader, Los Angeles Review, PANK, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Review, and 32 Poems, along with several anthologies, including: Why To These Rocks, Fifty Years of Poems from the Community of Writers. She lives in Berkeley and has been to Wales once—too many years ago to count.

Peter Hughes lives on the northern margins of Snowdonia where he runs Oystercatcher Press. He also teaches, and has been Judith E. Wilson Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Cambridge University. Shearsman published Peter’s Selected Poems alongside a volume entitled ‘An intuition of the particular’: some essays on the poetry of Peter Hughes. His other poetry publications include distinctive versions of Petrarch, Cavalcanti and Leopardi. His most recent book is A Berlin Entrainment (Shearsman).

Donna de la Perrière is the author of five collections of poetry: three books — Works of Love & Terror (2019), Saint Erasure (2010), and True Crime (2009), all from Talisman House —  as well as two chapbooks, Night Calendar (Omerta, 2018) and First Love (The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange Collection, 2013).

Her work has appeared in journals such as American Letters and Commentary, Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Five Fingers Review, Interim, Mantis, New American Writing, and Volt, as well as anthologies such as  Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children (2013), No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (2009), and Bay Poetics (2006).

The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry Award and a 2016 Creative Work Grant from Intersection for the Arts, she founded and curated the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series (2004 – 2019) in San Francisco. She teaches in the graduate and undergraduate creative writing programs at San Francisco State University and lives in Oakland, CA with the poet Joseph Lease and cats Whitman and Dickinson.

David Annwn’s most recent book of poetry is Resonance Field (2021) and his work features in The Edge of Necessary, Welsh Innovative Poetry and Blackbox Manifold 25 (2021). His poetry collaborations with master-calligrapher, Thomas Ingmire were the subject of an exhibition at California Book Club, San Francisco in 2016.

He has read at Caffe Trieste with Jack Hirschman and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art and has delivered filmed readings at the Hepworth Gallery, Yorkshire UK and in settings throughout Europe.  His poetry is featured in eight films by San Francisco film-maker, Howard Munson, including ‘Jeu de Marseilles’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Oj565sBH4 ). He is a recipient of a Cardiff International Poetry Award.

John Goodby writes: ‘Annwn has a mastery of different genres and modes  (concrete / typographical, discursive, lyrical, neomodernist paratactic) and the ability to switch between them in the course of a single poem.’

Billy Mills has written of Resonance Field: The whole book is alive with this sense of interlocking collaboration, with Annwn creating a resonance field in which multiple voices interweave to create a work of singular interest in which, as the final line says, ‘it is time to recover’. To recover ourselves and our shared heritage.’