In a Western Light: Poetry at the Edge of America

Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang’s third book of poems, The Boss, published by McSweeney’s, won the PEN Center USA Literary Award and a California Book Award. Her other poetry books are Salvinia Molesta and Circle. She has also published a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?. She lives in Southern California.

Brendan Constantine

Brendan Constantine’s work has appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Zyzzyva, and Ninth Letter, among other journals. His most recent collections are Birthday Girl With Possum (2011) and Calamity Joe (2012). He has received grants and commissions from the Getty Museum, James Irvine Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He currently teaches poetry at the Windward School and regularly offers classes to hospitals, foster homes, & with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project.

Kim Dower

Kim Dower is the City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood. Author of three collections of poetry — Air Kissing on Mars, Slice of Moon, and Last Train to the Missing Planet, her poems also appear in several anthologies including Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Beyond Baroque Books, as well as journals including Rattle, Barrow Street, Ploughshares, and Garrison Keillor’s, The Writer’s Almanac. Kim teaches the workshops Poetry and Dreaming and Poetry and Memory at Antioch University.

Blas Falconer

Blas Falconer is the author of A Question of Gravity and Light and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latino: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, his poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, and Puerto del Sol. He is the Coordinator for the Creative Writing Program at Austin Peay State University and the poetry editor at Zone 3 Journal/ Zone 3 Press.

Doug Kearney

Douglas Kearney’s collection of writing on poetics and performativity, Mess and Mess and (2015), was a Small Press Distribution Handpicked Selection. His third poetry collection, Patter (2014) examines miscarriage, infertility, and parenthood. Kearney’s second book, The Black Automaton (2009) was a National Poetry Series selection. A collection of opera libretti—Someone Took They Tongues—is forthcoming. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, residencies/fellowships from Cave Canem, The Rauschenberg Foundation, and others. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Poetry, nocturnes, Pleiades, Iowa Review, Boston Review, and Indiana Review; and various anthologies. He teaches at CalArts.

Brynn Saito

Brynn Saito is the author of The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the 2013 Northern California Book Award. Her second collection, Power Made Us Swoon, will be published in 2016. Brynn co-authored a chapbook, with Traci Brimhall, titled Bright Power, Dark Peace. Her work has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in such journals as Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, and Poetry Northwest. Born in Fresno, CA, Brynn now lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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