Friday May 7, 2021 7 PM
https://csus.zoom.us/j/8953526771
Host: Josh McKinney
Natasha Sajé was born in Munich, Germany in 1955 and grew up in New York City and northern New Jersey. Her first book of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), was chosen from over 900 manuscripts to win the Agnes Lynch Starrett prize, and was later awarded the Towson State Prize in Literature. Her second collection of poems, Bend, was published by Tupelo Press in 2004 and awarded the Utah Book Award in Poetry. Poems in her third book, Vivarium (Tupelo Press, 2014) received the Alice Fay di Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America. The book won the 15 Bytes Award. A chapbook of poems, Special Delivery, is forthcoming this summer from Diode Editions. Sajé’s post-modern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory, was published by the University of Michigan press in 2014. Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir-in-essays published by Trinity University Press in November, 2020, is a finalist for Pen, Lambda, and Foreword awards. Other honors include the Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College, the Robert Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, a Camargo Fellowship in France, a Hermitage artist residency, and a 2020 Pushcart Prize. Sajé has been teaching in the low residency Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program since 1996, and since 1998 has been a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she directs the Weeks Poetry Series.
Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas lives in the Sierra Foothills and is currently enrolled in the Vermont College of Fine Arts', MFA in Writing program. She is an eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a seven-time Best of the Net nominee. In 2012 she won the Red Ochre Chapbook Contest, with her manuscript, Before I Go to Sleep. In 2018 her book In the Making of Goodbyes was nominated for the Firecracker Award and 2019 her chapbook An Ode to Hope in the Midst of Pandemonium was a category finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her latest collection of poems Alice in Ruby Slippers, has been featured in Sundress Publication's, The Wardrobe's Best Dressed, and is on the shortlist for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize. Her work can be found online and in print and has been recently featured in Mezzo Cammin and Verse Daily. She has served as Editor-in-Chief for the Orchards Poetry Journal and Co-Editor-in-Chief for the Tule Review and is a former member of the Board of Directors for the Sacramento Poetry Center. In 2012 she was inducted into the Saratoga Authors Hall of Fame and according to family lore she is a direct descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson.