Poetry Flash – – Kelsay Books/Aldritch Press w/ Rachel Dacus, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, Eileen Malone, Kathleen McClung, Lenore Weiss, Andrena Zawinski

EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS is excited to welcome back our friends from Poetry Flash on Sunday, February 10th at 3pm. This month we will be joined by poets from Kelsay Books/Aldritch press: Rachel Dacus, Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas, Eileen Malone, Kathleen McClung, Lenore Weiss, Andrena Zawinski.

Poet and novelist Rachel Dacus’s collection, Gods of Water and Air, is deliciously diverse. Poems and tales of horseback riding, ballet class, a bipolar rocket scientist parent, a commercial fishing immigrant community abound. She is also author of The Renaissance Club, a time travel novel, and the poetry collections Femme au Chapeau and Earth Lessons. Her writing has appeared in Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, The Pedestal, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, as well as in anthologies.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas’s new book of poetry is On the Edge of the Ethereal. Sam Rasnake, editor of Blue Fifth Review, calls it, “a dark and beautiful book filled marvelously with the nature of loss, pain and its evasion, leaving, things left unsaid, ‘inhaling a world gone wrong’…Grellas is a remarkable poet with an unflinching eye and ear for details. The writing is a powerful, rewarding journey, not to be missed.” She is an eight-time Pushcart nominee and a four-time Best of the Net nominee. A Red Ochre Press Chapbook contest-winner, her work has appeared in many magazines including The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine. She has published other collections, including her chapbook, Things I Can’t Remember to Forget.

Eileen Malone has published her poetry in over 500 literary journals and anthologies, some of which have earned significant awards, including four Pushcart nominations. Her newest book is It Could Be Me, Although Unsure. Her previous books include Letters with Taloned Claws and I Should Have Given Them Water. She founded and now directs the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and its Awards Event at San Francisco Main Library. She has taught for California Poets in the Schools and at Bay Area community colleges, and hosted an online interview show for Cable Access TV San Francisco.

Kathleen McClung’s new book is The Typists Play Monopoly. Almost the Rowboat is her previous collection. Her poems appear widely in journals and anthologies including Southwest Review, Naugatuck River Review, Ekphrasis, Atlanta Review, California Quarterly, and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California. Winner of the Rita Dove, Morton Marr, Shirley McClure, and Maria W. Faust national poetry prizes, she is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and associate director and sonnet sponsor/judge for the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. She teaches at Skyline College, where she directs Women on Writing: WOW! Voices Now, on campus. She is a 2018-2019 writer-in-residence for Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

Lenore Weiss received an MFA in fiction from San Francisco State University where she won the Clark-Gross Award (judged by Paul La Farge) and the Robert Browning Dramatic Monologue Contest. She recently won first prize in the Alexandria Quarterly Press small stories series for her flash fiction chapbook, Holding on to the Fringes of Love. Her three poetry collections form a trilogy about being mortal: Cutting Down the Last Tree on Easter Island, Two Places, and The Golem. In reviewing Two Places, Nina Serrano wrote, “Weiss’ mind travels like the speed of light from the real, to the symbolic and the surreal.”

Andrena Zawinski’s poetry has received accolades for free verse, form, lyricism, spirituality, and social concern. Landings is her recent Kelsay Books collection. In Landings, she presents poems that embrace the worldwide condition of women, immigrants, and the working class alongside reverence for the natural world. Rebecca Foust lauds the collection “as a book that offers wisdom and solace and one you will take comfort in reading again and again.” Her other books include Something About, a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award winner, and Traveling in Reflected Light, a Kenneth Patchen Prize in Poetry winner.