February 7th 2008

Philip Levine

Philip Levine marks his 80th birthday in January of 2008. This reading is a celebration of the poetic career of this Pulitzer Prize winner, but it is no less a celebration of his enormously influential teaching career that spanned four decades at California State University, Fresno. On hand for the festivities will be, of course, the man himself. His former CSUF colleagues Peter Everwine, C. G. Hanzlicek, and Corrinne Hales will join a host of Phil’s former students. The readers will read both from Phil’s work and their own.

Philip Levine was born in 1928 in Detroit, where he attended the public schools. His later education involved several industrial jobs, undergraduate studies at Wayne State University, and graduate studies in the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He eventually settled in Fresno, pursuing a teaching career at CSUF that touched upon four decades. Levine has written twenty volumes of poetry, two books of translations, two books of interviews, and a volume of autobiographical essays, The Bread of Time, which appeared in 1994. Over the years, Levine’s books have garnered many awards. The Names of the Lost won the Lenore Marshall Award for the best book of poetry published by an American in 1976. Ashes and Seven Years from Somewhere both received Nation Book Critics Circle Awards, and Ashes also received the American Book Award in 1980. In 1987, Levine was given the Ruth Lily Poetry Prize “for distinguished poetic achievements” awarded by Poetry magazine and the American Council for the Arts. His 1991 volume, What Work Is, was the winner of the National Book Award in Poetry. The Simple Truth, published in 1994, received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His most recent book is the 2004 collection, Breath.

Bruce Boston

B. H. Boston and his family have lived in San Diego since Nixon fled the White House. Boston received a B.A. in English from Fresno State University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Irvine. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Crazy Horse, Black Warrior Review, Poetry NOW, Western Humanities Review, the Marlboro Review, Ploughshares, Blackbird, and various anthologies, including Down at the Santa Fe Depot, The Geography of Home (Heyday Books), How Much Earth (Roundhouse Press), A Condition of the Spirit: The Life and Work of Larry Levis (Eastern Washington University Press), and Homage to Vallejo (Greenhouse Review Press). A book of his poems, Only the Living, was published by Helix Press. He is currently managing editor of Poetry International at San Diego State University and has taught literature and creative writing at La Jolla Country Day School for the last thirty-three years.

Glover Davis

Glover Davis is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at San Diego State University. His books of poetry are Bandaging Bread, August Fires, Legend, and Separate Lives. His poems have appeared in many journals including The Southern Review, Poetry, The New England Review, and The Journal. He lives in Fresno, California.

Blas Manuel De Luna

Blas Manuel De Luna was born in Tijuana, Mexico and raised in Madera, California. He received an M.A. in English from California State University, Fresno, where he had the great fortune to study with Peter Everwine, Connie Hales, C.G. Hanzlicek, and Philip Levine. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Washington, where he was the 1995-1996 Klepser Fellow, and, later, a teaching assistant. His poetry collection, Bent to the Earth, was published in 2005 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and was a 2006 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Currently, he teaches high school English in Firebaugh, California and writes when he can.

Peter Everwine

Peter Everwine is the author of eight poetry collections, the most recent of which is From the Meadow (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). He has received the Lamont Prize and was a nominee for the National Book Award, and he has been given fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. He retired from teaching at CSUF in 1992.

Connie Hales

Connie Hales is the author of Separate Escapes, winner of the Richard Snyder Poetry Prize (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002), Out of This Place (March Street Press, 2001), Underground (Ahsahta Press, 1986), and January Fire (Devil’s Millhopper Press). She was a long time colleague of Philip Levine at CSUF, where she teaches in the MFA program.

C.G. Hanzlicek

C. G. Hanzlicek’s eighth book of poetry is The Cave: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). He retired from CSUF in 2001, after thirty-five years of teaching and, for most of those years, directing the creative writing program.

Sandra Hoben

Sandra Hoben, who received an M.A. from the writing program at Fresno State in 1975, has published poems in magazines and anthologies, and a chapbook, Snow Flowers, from Westigan Press. She has taught at the University of Utah, World College West, and in California and Utah Poets-in-the-Schools programs.

Lawson Inada

Because Lawson Inada attended classes taught by Philip Levine, he is an emeritus professor at Southern Oregon University and Poet Laureate of Oregon.

Jean Janzen

Jean Janzen was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, was raised in the midwestern United States, and has lived in Fresno, California since 1961. She completed her undergraduate studies at Fresno Pacific University and received her MA at CSUF. She has published six books of poems, the last entitled Piano in the Vineyard, and one book of essays, Elements of Faithful Writing. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Image, Christian Century, and many other journals, as well as numerous anthologies. She was a recipient of the NEA grant award in 1995. Janzen has taught poetry at Fresno Pacific University and Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.

Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis’ poems appear in the anthologies California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present (Heyday Books), Poems of the American West (Knopf), Poetry Daily (Sourcebooks), Place as Purpose: Poetry of the Western States (Autry/Sun & Moon), Stand Up Poetry (U. of Iowa), and in major literary publications in the US and UK. She has recent or forthcoming poems in The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Pool. Her last collection, In Danger, was part of The California Poetry Series (Heyday Books/Roundhouse Press, and her new manuscript is called Open 24 Hours. She teaches several levels of poetry through the UCLA Extension Writers Program including a course she developed, “Poetry and the Movies: The Poem Noir.” In 2006 she taught “L.A. Stories,” fiction and film, at Emerson College in Burbank. Suzanne edits the eclectic web literary magazine, Speechless.

Sam Pereira

Sam Pereira received his BA from California State University, Fresno and his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has published two previous books of poetry: The Marriage of the Portuguese (L’Epervier Press, 1978) and Brittle Water (Abattoir Editions/Penumbra Press, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 1987). His new collection, A Café in Boca, will be published by Tebot Bach in 2007.

DeWayne Rail

DeWayne Rail took classes from Philip Levine for one year, 1966-67, but the effect of that year is astonishing. He took up poetry writing as a way of life, went away to get an MFA, published some poems here and there, came back to Fresno and taught poetry writing, among other things, at Fresno City College.

Dixie Salazar

Dixie Salazar has published three books of poetry: Hotel Fresno by Blue Moon Press in 1988, Reincarnation of the Commonplace (national poetry award winner) by Salmon Run Press in 1999, and Blood Mysteries by University of Arizona in 2003. Limbo, her novel, was published by White Pine Press in 1995.

Currently she teaches English at California State University and shows oil paintings and collage work at the Silva/ Salazar studios at 654 Van Ness in Fresno, California. She has also taught extensively in the California prisons and the Fresno County jail.

David St. John

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us.

Brian Turner

Brian Turner’s debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award and the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection. Turner has also been awarded the 2006 Northern California Book Award in Poetry, the 2006 Maine Literary Award in Poetry, the 2006 Sheila Margaret Motton Award, the 2006 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Poetry, a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship, a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the 2007 Poet’s Prize.

John Veinberg

Jon Veinberg holds an MFA from the Universty of California at Irvine. He has authored four books of poetry and co-edited the Fresno anthology, Piecework. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants and continues to scramble for decent jobs.