Finding Lost Voices: Poetry in the Parks Reading Now Virtual Due to Fires in CA

Happening now! In case you are free and want to join, here is the link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85050931377

Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate and the first to be officially reappointed to a second term. He is the author of four books, most recently In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems. He co-edited The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit and his writing appears in anthologies such as Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common; Here: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; Poetry Goes to the Movies; and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States, he lives in Fresno, California.

Zoë Ryder White’s first full-length collection, The Visible Field, was published by River River Books in February, 2026. A chapbook, Via Post, was a finalist for Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook award and won the Sixth Finch chapbook contest in 2022. HYPERSPACE was the editors’ choice pick for the Verse Tomaž Šalamun Prize in 2020 and is available from Factory Hollow Press. She co-authored A Study in Spring (Rabbit Catastrophe Press, 2015) and Elsewhere (Sixth Finch Press, 2020) with Nicole Callihan. Her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Iterant, Plume, and Threepenny Review, among others. A former elementary school teacher, she edits books for educators about the craft of teaching. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley with her family.

The author of twenty books of his own and as many books of translations, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert. He has degrees in geology and literature. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Best Translated Book Award, Gander has been a signal voice for environmental poetics. His latest books are Mojave Ghost and the translation, Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems of Jeannette L. Clariond. A novel, The Weight of a Frozen Moment and a selected poems, Dune Lines, are forthcoming in April 2027.

Robert Hass is a professor emeritus of poetry and poetics at UC Berkeley. His most recent book of poems is Summer Snow from Harper Collins, which also published his recent book of Czeslaw Milosz translations, A Poet in the New World. Copper Canyon produced his recent essays, A Third Commonness.

Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975. She has published chapbooks with Penumbra Press, a+bend press, EmPress, A Minus Press, and Albion Books, as well as twelve full-length collections with Wesleyan University Press, including Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation (forthcoming September, 2026), In A Few Minutes Before Later (2022); Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (2013), and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award. Hillman’s recognition’s include the Fred Cody lifetime achievement award, as well asthe Pen (Oakland) Lifetime Achievement Award. A collection of essays, Three Talks, was published by University of Virginia Press in 2024. She is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in the Bay Area with her husband, Robert Hass.