Celebrate the publication of our latest anthology, Suitcase of Chrysanthemums, at San Francisco's wonderful Alley Cat Books and meet an indie press looking for new voices.
Featuring contributors and special guests Zoë Christopher, Kit Kennedy, Calder G. Lorenz, Richard Loranger, Mary Mackey, and William Taylor Jr., plus editors David Lawton and Jane Ormerod.
Suitcase of Chrysanthemums is an exhilarating collection of contemporary poetry and fiction from established and emerging writers across the United States and beyond. The anthology also contains an interview with actor/director Sonja Sohn (The Wire, The Chi, Baltimore Rising).
Submissions for our next anthology are open October 15 2018 to January 15 2019.
Zoë Christopher published her first poem at sixteen. Soon after she was sidetracked by putting food on the table as an ice-cream truck driver, waitress, medical assistant, addictions counselor, astrologer, art installer, bookseller, Holotropic breathworker, and trainer of psychospiritual crisis support. (She didn’t get paid for milking goats, teaching photography, or raising her son.) Zoë grew up in Los Angeles where her mother was in show business, but that’s another story.
Kit Kennedy serves as Poet in Residence of SF Bay Times and Poet in Residence of her church. She has published six collections of poetry. She regrets little except she never (to date) has skateboarded but she is an avid pickleball player.
Richard Loranger is a writer, performer, visual artist, and all around squeaky wheel, currently residing in Oakland, California. His recent book of flash prose, Sudden Windows (Zeitgeist Press, 2016), has been warmly received. He is also the author of Poems for Teeth, The Orange Book, and nine chapbooks. Other recent work can be found in Oakland Review, Full of Crow, and the online anthology HIV Here and Now.
Calder G. Lorenz is the author of One Way Down (Or Another), his debut novel from Civil Coping Mechanisms. His writing can be found in Curly Red Stories, Black Heart Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, New Pop Lit, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Chicago Literati, and Lunch Ticket. He lives in San Francisco.
Mary Mackey is the author of eight collections of poetry including Sugar Zone, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and Finalist for the 2012 Northern California Book Reviewers’ Award, and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974–2018 (Marsh Hawk Press). Poet D. Nurske has called Jaguars “a monumental achievement.” She is also the author of fourteen novels, several of which have made the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller Lists. website
William Taylor Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, plus a volume of fiction, and was a recipient of a 2013 Acker Award. He recently edited Cockymoon: Selected Poems of Jack Micheline, published by Zeitgeist Press. From the Essential Handbook on Making it to the Next Whatever is his latest collection of poetry.