"The understanding of a culture comes from hearing the language, tasting the food, seeing personal interactions, experiencing the traditions, and so much more in context."
— Elizabeth Laval & Candice Pendergrass, Sikh Youth Public History Project
"The understanding of a culture comes from hearing the language, tasting the food, seeing personal interactions, experiencing the traditions, and so much more when it is in context."
— Elizabeth Laval & Candice Pendergrass, Sikh Youth Public History Project
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and writer. Former California Poet laureate and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard in Comparative Literature. For fifteen years, he worked as a businessman before quitting at forty-one to become a full-time writer. His surname is pronounced Joy-a.
Lee Herrick is the current California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit. His writing appears widely in literary magazines, textbooks, and anthologies such as HERE: Poems for the Planet, with an introduction by the Dalai Lama; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, with an introduction by Common; and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted to the United States at ten months, he teaches at Fresno City College and the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.
Poet and visual artist Susan Kelly-DeWitt is the author of the full-length poetry collections Gatherer’s Alphabet (CA Poets Prize, Gunpowder Press, 2022), Gravitational Tug (Main Street Rag, 2020), Spider Season (Cold River Press, 2016), and The Fortunate Islands (Marick Press, 2008), as well as numerous chapbooks. Her honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University and the Chicago Literary Award from Another Chicago Magazine. Her work has been included in many anthologies, including The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (2011), In Whatever Houses We May Visit: An Anthology of Poems That Have Inspired Physicians (2008), Highway 99: A Literary Journey through California’s Great Central Valley (1996) and Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry (2001).
Current Calaveras County Poet Laureate, Linda Toren lives in the foothills of Calaveras County with her husband Theo, dogs, a cat, two pigs and many chickens. Linda is a retired teacher and currently director of Voices of Wisdom through Manzanita Writer’s Press (MWP). She has presented poetry workshops for children and adults—publishing schoolwide collections of poetry and art at local elementary schools for more than 15 years. Her poetry appears in the following collections Manzanita: Poetry and Prose of the Mother Lode & Sierra (MWP 1995 – 2008), Wild Edges (MWP 2013) Wine, Cheese & Chocolate (MWP 2014), Voices of Wisdom (MWP 2018, 2019), Out of the Fire (MWP 2017), Teaching with Fire (Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach) by Sam M. Intrator & Megan Scribner, editors (2003), CollisionV: an Intersection of Poetry and Photography (2018).
Monika Rose, at home in the foothills of Calaveras County since the early 1980s, living the rural good life with her husband on a small cattle ranch, founded Manzanita Writers Press, a nonprofit literary publisher in San Andreas. She has been published in many anthologies and literary magazines. Busy editing and publishing California authors’ books, leading workshops, directing programs, and promoting the literary arts in the region, with nine new books coming out by the press in 2023, she has also focused on her writing projects. Her book of poems, River by the Glass, by GlenHill Publications, and her children’s book for early readers, Bed Bumps, will have company soon with a novel, a collection of short fiction, a poetry collection, and three more children’s books. The Call – A Moth Journey, a children’s book for grades 4-7, will be released in August of 2023. As an Adjunct Associate Professor of English at San Joaquin Delta College for over two decades and retired from full-time high school teaching, she continues to encourage her students to write their stories.
