Julia Connor is
Sacramento Poet Laureate 2005-2008. She began her studies at the Poetics Program of New College
of California in San Francisco at the age of forty. There, from 1981 to 1987, she studied with
poets Robert Duncan, Diane di Prima, and David Meltzer. Since 1988, she has taught poetry in
a wide variety of situations from Graduate MFA Programs such as Naropa University's Jack Kerouac
School of Disembodied Poetics where she was on the faculty, to state prisons. She teaches poetry
workshops for all levels of experience, which she has presented at places as diverse as Nathan
Mayhew Seminars, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and Emerson College, Sussex, England. Her
honors include a Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission Literary Fellowship and a California Arts Council Literary Fellowship.
Ray A. March graduated from San Francisco State where he earned a degree in English Literature/Humanities. As a lifelong journalist and nonfiction author he has worked on newspapers in Europe and the U.S. His articles and essays have appeared in Time, The New York Times, Oceans, San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. His first major work, an oral history, “Alabama Bound: Forty-Five Years Inside A Prison System,” was nominated for the National Book Award by the University of Alabama Press. His next book, “River in Ruin: The Story of the Carmel River,” will be published in spring 2012 by the University of Nebraska Press.
John Reed is the author of two novels, “Thirteen Mountain,” and “The Kingfisher’s Call,” and he has edited two anthologies from Triple Tree Press, 2001 MOTA short story collection, “Truth,” and “Dead on Demand,” an anthology of ghost stories. He has been a presenter at the Maui Writers Retreat and a staff instructor at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference. He has also done workshops for the Willamette Writer’s Conference in Portland, the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Conference in Seattle, the San Miguel Writer’s Conference. He developed the “Writers-By-The-Sea” workshop series on the Oregon coast where he is the principal instructor.
Joseph Stroud is the author of five books of poetry: “In the Sleep of Rivers,” “Signatures,” “Below Cold Mountain,” “Country of Light” (a Lannan Literary Selection and a finalist for the Northern California Book Critics Award), and “Of This World: New and Selected Poems,” as well as six limited editions: “Unzen,” “Burning the Years,” “Three Odes of Pablo Neruda,” “Ukiyo-E,” “Night Psalms,” and “Kingdom Come.” His work has earned a Pushcart Prize and he was selected by the Poet Laureate of the United States for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in Poetry from the Library of Congress. In 2011 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems have been featured in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times as well as on National Public Radio. His most recent book, “Of This World,” received the Poetry Center Book Award for the best book of poetry of 2009, and it was also a finalist for the PEN Literary Award USA.