SPOKEN WORD ARTISTS BRING SANTA MONICA
TO LIFE WITH POETRY

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date:      August 17, 2006
Contact:  Robert Graves, Public Services Librarian, (310) 458-2201, ext. 5956 

On August 31, 2006, from 7:00 to 8:30 p.m., in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium, the Santa Monica Public Library and Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Division will present “In A Sense: Santa Monica Live 2” -- the second in a series of three spoken word events that celebrate Santa Monica as a sense of place.  

The series is offered as a part of Creative Capital, the cultural planningprocess that examines the future of culture and arts in the city.  Hosted by Paul Lieber, well-known host of Why Poetry? on KPFK, the evening will feature three poets who will read works inspired by Santa Monica.  Guest poets for evening are: Sarah Maclay, John Harris and Noah Blaustein.

 Sarah Maclay's work has appeared in Ploughshares, ZZYZYVA and other journals, including Poetry International, where she currently serves as book review editor. Her debut collection, Whore, won the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and she has received a Pushcart nomination. A native of Montana, she currently lives in Los Angeles.

In 1969, John Harris founded the Venice Poetry Workshop at Beyond Baroque with Joseph Hansen. In the 1970s and 1980s, he was the proprietor of Papa Bach Books, the historic bookstore and literary center where a generation of Los Angeles poets came of age artistically.  His poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies and in two collections, Where Love Is and Against the Day of the Dead.

Noah Blaustein’s poems have appeared in journals such as Orion and Pleiades. He is the editor of the poetry anthology, Motion: American Sports Poems. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts MFA program, he currently lives and teaches in Los Angeles.

For more information about this free public program, contact the Santa Monica Public Library at (310) 458-8600; or visit the Library’s web site at www.smpl.org.

 ###

This page was last updated on 09/12/06.