New Writing Series Fall 2018

Sesshu Foster's novel, Atomik Aztex, won a 2006 Believer Magazine Award. Winner of two American Book Awards, he’s author of four books of poetry, co-editor of Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry, and co-translator of Akrilica, by Juan Felipe Herrera, former Poet Laureate of the United States. His latest book is City of the Future (2018, Kaya Press). Since 1985, he’s taught composition and literature in East Los Angeles, as well as creative writing at the University of Iowa, Pomona College, the California Institute of the Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

In a June 2018 article, Mike Sonksen writes, “Raised in the City Terrace section of East Los Angeles, the award-winning poet and educator Sesshu Foster is one of the most influential Angeleno authors of the last 30 years. Throughout a career dating to the mid-1980s, he has taught English in East Los Angeles public schools. His new book from Kaya Press, City of the Future, continues his legacy of mapping the real Los Angeles and resisting the “apartheid imagination” through writing, poetry, and the mentorship of new generations.” In her 2015 Al-Jazeera profile Tammy Kim writes, “To those familiar with his work, Foster is vital; one of the “iconic voices writing from Los Angeles,” says Elaine Katzenberger, his editor at City Lights, the bookstore and publisher founded by beatnik Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Manuel Paul López – Wednesday, November 14, 2018 – Geisel Library, Seuss Room at 5:00 pm

Manuel Paul López's books include These Days of Candy (Noemi Press, 2017), The Yearning Feed (University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), winner of the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize, 1984 (Amsterdam Press, 2010) and Death of a Mexican and Other Poems (Bear Star Press, 2006). He also co-edited Reclaiming Our Stories (City Works Press, 2016). A CantoMundo fellow, his work has been published in Bilingual Review, Denver Quarterly, Hanging Loose, Huizache, Puerto del Sol, and ZYZZYVA, among others. He lives in San Diego and teaches at San Diego City College.

Artist Statement:

from Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and Me

I like frenetic energy, I like dissonance, I like interplanetary flight patterns, I like unapologetic confidence verging toward self-conscious comedown, I like sloth spirit, I like uber vulnerable tube socks, I like contradiction, I like silence that pulsates with tension, silences that engage in epic timelines of extreme cogitation, I like high-flying off the turnbuckle Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka risk taking, I like monster mash, I like art like I like my albondigas, piping hot aromatic madness with nuanced flavors inspired by cultural, geographical and inter-generational markers. I like my art like I like Prince’s “Batdance,” all purpletechnic, angular, wise-ass and emancipatory. I like work that points toward fable and fairy tale, I like faint notes of surrealism, Dada-caca, Raskal Chicanx Poetiks, big-hearted lyrical-fronterismo-collage idioms, I like elliptical dream messaging derived from the ambulatory interior vita, I like art that surveils state-sanctioned surveillance, hyper-policing of person/hood, neighbor/hood and global/hood, atmospheric violence in its various iterations, loss and love, and most of all, I like art that initiates the slow asphyxiation of ego addiction.

Marilyn Chin – Wednesday, November 28, 2018 – Geisel Library, Seuss Room at 5:00 pm

Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. She is presently celebrating the launch of her new book A PORTRAIT OF THE SELF AS NATION: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (W.W. Norton, 2018).

Marilyn Chin’s other books of poems include HARD LOVE PROVINCE, RHAPSODY IN PLAIN YELLOW, DWARF BAMBOO, and THE PHOENIX GONE, THE TERRACE EMPTY. Her book of wild girl fiction is called REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN.

She has won numerous awards, including the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, the United States Artist Foundation Award, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, a Lannan Fellowship and others.

She is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry, and The Best American Poetry…She was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series The Language of Life, and Poetry Everywhere, introduced by Garrison Keillor. She has read and taught workshops all over the world. She is Professor Emerita of San Diego State University and recently, she was guest poet at universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney and Berlin, Iowa and elsewhere. In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu.

Presently, she serves as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets.