Well-RED: Doren Robbins and Sharon Olson

Tuesday, June 9, 7pm on Zoom
Doren Robbins and Sharon Olson
open mic follows

online on Zoom
Free, register on Eventbrite!

presented with Works/San José

Typically featured at Works/San José art and performance center, performance begins via Zoom at 7:00pm sharp!

First 15 people to register for a free ticket get on the open mic list. Curators will email all registrants the meeting ID and password.

Each open mic participant has 5 minutes.

Sharon Olson is a Stanford graduate, with an M.L.S. from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Oregon. She worked as a librarian from 1978 to 2007 at the Palo Alto City Library, and was a long-standing member of the Palo Alto poetry group Waverley Writers. Her publications include a chapbook Clouds Brushed in Later, which won the Abby Niebauer Memorial Chapbook Award (presented by the Poetry Center San José in 1987), and two full-length books of poetry, The Long Night of Flying (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006) and Will There Be Music? (Cherry Grove Collections, 2019). Her poems have appeared in many journals including Off the Coast, String Poet, Arroyo Literary Review, The Curator, Adanna, Heron Tree, New Verse News and Cider Press Review. She has published (with co-author Chris Schopfer) numerous articles about the Sandford family of New Jersey in The Genealogical Magazine of New Jersey. Since 2008 she and her husband have lived on the East Coast, currently in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, where she is a member of the U.S. 1 Poets Collective and performs with Cool Women Poets. She is also affiliated with the Scriven Arts Colony in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, and the Guilford Poets Guild in Guilford, Connecticut, which interviewed her recently in April, 2020. See more information at her blog: https://slopoet.blogspot.com.

Doren Robbins is a poet, mixed media artist, literary critic and composer of poetic prose monologues. His work has appeared in many publications, including The American Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Third Rail: international literature and arts, Angry Old Man, Another Chicago Magazine, Café Irreal, Cimarron Review, Empty Mirror, Exquisite Corpse, Kayak, 5 AM, Hotel Amerika, The Indiana Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Otoliths, Sulfur, and The Iowa Review. Past collections of his poetry, Driving Face Down and My Piece of the Puzzle were awarded the Blue Lynx Poetry Award 2001 and the 2008 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Poetry Award, respectively. His book Twin Extra: A Poem In Three Parts (Wild Ocean Press 2015) was nominated for the National Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry. In 2020 Spuyten Duyvil Press published his monograph, Apocalypse Contemporary, on Sharon Doubiago’s book Naked to the Earth; and highmoonoon books published Not Fade Away: Poetic Prose Monologues, Three Sequences. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Foothill College.

“These are remarkable, fiery poems. Poems that would urge any poet on, language that tears open reality. I think this is Doren Robbins’s finest book, and I’ve admired his work for a good while. The imagination, its energy and precision, is immense. There’s a delicate observation of even the rawest materials, a tenderness for humanity in all its cruelty, stupidity, and often invisible dignity and grace, that feels to me like his peculiar, original contribution to–well, to the puzzle of what we have become: people, Americans, men and women today, above all those who are “absent,” unregistered, undocumented in both senses.” -Adrienne Rich