Join three outstanding Bay Area poets  Wedneday evening, October 3, 2012, in beautiful Angelico Hall on the Dominican University Campus in San Rafael, Calif. to benefit  Poetry Flash. All funds raised will go to continue the forty-year tradition of covering everything poetic about the West Coast (and that's a lot).

Robert Hass ~ United States Poet Laureate (1995-1997) and National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet-Environmentalist and teacher is, first of all, a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. Widely read and much honored, he has brought the kind of energy in his poetry to his work as an essayist, translator, and activist on behalf of poetry, literacy, and the environment. Most notably, in his tenure as United States Poet Laureate, Robert Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, "imagination makes communities." He crisscrossed the country speaking at Rotary Club meetings, raising money to organize conferences such as "Watershed," which brought together noted novelists, poets, and storytellers to talk about writing, nature, and community. For Hass, everything is connected. When he works to heighten literacy, he is also working to promote awareness about the environment. Hass believes that natural beauty must be tended to and that caring for a place means knowing it intimately. Poets, especially, need to pay constant attention to the interaction of mind and environment. And when he is talking about poetry itself, whether Matsuo Basho's or Elizabeth Bishop's, Hass is both spontaneous and original, offering poetic insights that cannot be found in any textbook. Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, as well as a book of essays on poetry,  Twentieth Century Pleasures. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Transtromer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life. He was the guest editor of the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry. His essay collection Now & Then, which includes his Washington Post articles, was published in April 2007. As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW) , an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. Hass is chairman of ROW’s board of directors, and judges their annual international environmental poetry and art contest for youth; he also wrote the introduction to the poetry collection River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things. He is also a board member of International Rivers Network. Robert Hass was chosen as Educator of the Year by the North American Association on Environmental Education and, in 2005, elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote the introduction to a new edition of selected Walt Whitman poems in Song of Myself: And Other Poems. His most recent volume entitled The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems was published by Ecco in spring 2010. Hass is currently at work on a collection of selected essays titled What Light Can Do to be published in August 2012. Awarded the MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics' Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley. "Hass has significantly broadened the role of poet laureate to include not only his love for poetry but also his concern for literacy and his passion for environmentalism." - Los Angeles Times


Gillian Conoley was born in Austin Texas, where, on its rural outskirts, her father and mother owned and operated a radio station. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including THE PLOT GENIE, PROFANE HALO, LOVERS IN THE USED WORLD, and TALL STRANGER, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work has received many prizes, including the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Her poems have been anthologized in over 20 national and international anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s forthcoming Postmodern American Poetry, American Hybrid,  and Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricism. A new collection, Peace, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in spring 2014. Her translations of Henri Michaux’s Four Hundred Men on the Cross were recently excerpted in an APR special supplement.  Editor and founder of Volt magazine, she teaches in the Program for Writers and Poets at Sonoma State University.


Writer giovanni singleton is a native of Richmond, Virginia, a former debutant, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal committed to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Her debut collection, Ascension (Counterpath Press, 2012), is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane. singleton has recently been selected for the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Series, which recognizes recent first book poets. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon says, "giovanni singleton lets silence do its work. The poems are minimalist, while engaging a concern for the historical, the personal, the spiritual. I hear Lucille Clifton saying 'the human, the human' when I read this." She is a recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award Show for Literature and her writing has recently appeared in VOLT, Poet Lore, Zen Monster, and is forthcoming in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women, What I Say: Innovative Poetries by Black Artists in America, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. Work from her AMERICAN LETTERS series was selected for San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry & Performance Festival. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Workshop, Napa Valley Writers Conference, Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Writers Workshop, and Cave Canem. singleton has given presentations on writing, editing, graphic design, and publishing at high schools, colleges, and conferences such as the American Literature Association, Series X: Bay Area Women Publishers, and the New York Festival of Literary Magazines. She has received fellowships from the Squaw Valley and Napa Valley Writers Workshops and has served as a guest writer at Cal State Los Angeles, Chabot College, and California College of Arts. Over the past 15 years, she has taught poetry at Saint Mary’s College, Naropa University, and at museums and schools throughout the Bay Area.  She coordinates Lunch Poems, the monthly poetry reading series at UC Berkeley under the direction of Robert Hass. She collects bookmarks and enjoys figs and greek style yogurt.