Authors

Anne Coray

Anne Coray

ANNE CORAY, author of Bone Strings, lives at her birthplace on remote Qizhjeh Vena (Lake Clark) in southwest Alaska. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poetry, Seneca Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Rattapallax, among others. She has been a finalist with Carnegie Mellon, Water Press & Media, and Bright Hill Press, as well as for the Frances Locke Memorial Award and the Rita Dove Poetry Award. For several years she worked for the bilingual program in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, north of Anchorage. She lives with her husband, Steve, and her dog, Zipper.

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Lucille Lang Day

Lucille Lang Day

LUCILLE LANG DAY edited and contributed to Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery  (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2021). Her poetry collections are Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place (Blue Light Press, 2020),  Becoming an Ancestor (Cervena Barva Press, 2015), Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems (Blue Light Press, 2015), The Curvature of Blue (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), God of the Jellyfish (Cervena Barva Press, 2007), The Book of Answers (Finishing Line Press, 2006), Infinities (Cedar Hill Publications, 2002), Greatest Hits, 1975-2000 (Pudding House Publications, 2001), Wild One (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2000), Fire in the Garden (Mother’s Hen, 1997) and Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (Berkeley Poets’ Workshop and Press, 1982), which was selected by Robert Pinsky, David Littlejohn, and Michael Rubin for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She is a coeditor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2016) and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018), a co-author of How to Encourage Girls in Math and Science: Strategies for Parents and Educators (Dale Seymour), and the author of the libretto for Eighteen Months to Earth, a science fiction opera with music by John Niec. Heyday published her first children’s book, Chain Letter, in 2005, and her memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, in 2012. Scarlet Tanager published her second children’s book, The Rainbow Zoo, in 2016. She received her M.A. in English and M.F.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and her M.A. in zoology and Ph.D. in science/mathematics education from the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for seventeen years as director of the Hall of Health, a museum in Berkeley. She is of Wampanoag, British, and Swiss/German descent.

Books

Poetry & Science
Fire and Rain
Jack Foley

Jack Foley

JACK FOLEY, editor of The “Fallen Western Star” Wars (Scarlet Tanager Books), is the author of the companion critical volumes O Powerful Western Star (recipient of the Artists Embassy Literary / Cultural Award 1998-2000) and Foley’s Books: California Rebels, Beats, and Radicals. Among his poetry books are Exiles, Adrift, and Gershwin. Foley’s radio show, “Cover to Cover,” is heard every Wednesday on Berkeley station KPFA; his column, “Foley’s Books,” appears weekly in the online magazine The Alsop Review (www.alsopreview.com). A contributing editor of Poetry Flash, he lives in Oakland, California.

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The Fallen Western Star Wars
Daniel Hawkes

Daniel Hawkes

DANIEL HAWKES received his M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from Rutgers University. He has taught English at Rutgers and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Now living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he grew up, he is currently a science and technical writer/editor at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Catching the Bullet and Other Stories (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2000) is his first book.

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Catching the Bullet
Marc Elihu Hofstadter

Marc Elihu Hofstadter

MARC ELIHU HOFSTADTER, author of Luck (Scarlet Tanager, 2008) and Visions: Paintings Seen Through the Optic of Poetry (Scarlet Tanager, 2001), was born in New York City in 1945. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz, writing his doctoral dissertation on the late poetry and poetics of William Carlos Williams.

He taught numerous classes at UC Santa Cruz, American literature and English language at the Universite d’Orleans in France, and American literature at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He received a second Master’s degree in Library and Information Studies from the University of California at Berkeley, and for twenty-three years worked as the librarian of the San Francisco Municipal Railway, the city of San Francisco’s transit agency. He is the author of House of Peace (Mother’s Hen, 1999) and Shark’s Tooth (Regent Press, 2006), and his poetry, translations, and critical articles have appeared widely in literary magazines.

Book

Luck
Visions
Risa Kaparo

Risa Kaparo

RISA KAPARO, author of Embrace (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2002), is a teacher, therapist, author and award-winning poet who makes her home on the island of Kauai. Her poems, articles and essays have appeared in many journals, magazines and anthologies.

She grew up in New York City and earned her M.A. in Fiber Arts from Goddard College, then her M.A. and Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the Professional School for Psychological Studies. She has taught at M.I.T., John F. Kennedy University, the California Institute of Integral Studies and other universities and professional institutions. Maintaining a private practice in Hawaii and California, she gives lectures, seminars and workshops throughout North America, Europe and Asia.

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Embrace
Richard Kluger

Richard Kluger

RICHARD KLUGER, author of Hamlet’s Children, is an American social historian and novelist who, after working as a New York journalist and publishing executive, turned in mid-career to writing books that have won wide critical acclaim. His two best known works are Simple Justice, considered the definitive account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 landmark decision outlawing racially segregated public schools, and Ashes to Ashes, a critical history of the cigarette industry and its lethal toll on smokers, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

Simple Justice was a finalist for the National Book Award, as was Kluger’s second nonfiction work, The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune. Kluger is the author of three other well received works of history, Seizing Destiny, about the relentless expansion of America’s territorial boundaries; The Bitter Waters of Medicine Creek, about a tragic clash between white settlers and a tribal nation in territorial Washington, and Indelible Ink, about publisher John Peter Zenger and the origins of press freedom in America.

Of his seven novels, the most widely read were Members of the Tribe, about mob justice  toward an outlander falsely accused of murder, and The Sheriff of Nottingham, which Time called “richly imagined and beautifully written.” He also co-authored two novels with his wife Phyllis, a fiber artist and herself the author of two books on needlework design. The Klugers live in Berkeley. 

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Hamlet's Children by Richard Kluger
Richard Levine

Richard Michael Levine

RICHARD MICHAEL LEVINE, author of Catch and Other Poems (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2015), has written magazine articles for many national publications, including Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, New York, The New York Times Magazine and Esquire, where he wrote a media column and was a contributing writer. He has been an editor or columnist at Newsweek, Saturday Review and New Times, received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship and has been a professor at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His bestselling book, Bad Blood: A Family Murder in Marin County, was published by Random House and New American Library and has been translated into several languages. A short story collection, The Man Who Gave Away His Organs, is available from Capra Press.

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Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky

NAOMI RUTH LOWINSKY was born in California to Jewish parents who emigrated from Europe to escape persecution. Her childhood was spent in many landscapes: North Carolina, Italy, New York, New Jersey, back to California.

She studied literature at the University of California at Berkeley and now writes poetry and prose, teaches psychology and creativity, and practices Jungian analysis. She is a member analyst of the San Francisco Jung Institute, where she teaches in the training program as well as in the public programs. She is Poetry and Fiction Editor for Psychological Perspectives, a magazine published by the Los Angeles Jung Institute, and reviews poetry for The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal. Her book, The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots, was published by Putnam in 1992. Her first poetry collection, red clay is talking, was published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2000. A chapbook, a maze, was published by Modest Proposal in 2004. Her collection is crimes of the dreamer, published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2005.

Books

Crimes of the Dreamer
Red Clay is Talking
Ruth Nolan

Ruth Nolan

RUTH NOLAN, coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018), is a former BLM California Desert District wildland firefighter and a widely published writer/scholar whose work focuses on California’s deserts. She is professor of creative writing at College of the Desert, Palm Desert, Calfiornia. She’s received a Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Fellowship and a California Writers Residency Award. She’s the author of the poetry book Ruby Mountain and essay collections California Drive and Notes from the Gateway to Death Valley, and editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts. Her short story “Palimpsest,” published in LA Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers, received a Sequestrum Magazine 2016 Editor’s Reprint Award and was nominated for a 2016 PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She holds her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside.

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Fire and Rain
Gina Aoay Orosco

Gina Aoay Orosco

GINA AOAY OROSCO, illustrator of The Rainbow Zoo (Scarlet Tanager), was born and raised in San Francisco. She attended the Academy of Art University where she received a BFA in illustration. She currently lives in the Bay Area with her beloved husband and charming guinea pig. She loves trying all sorts of food and would love to try a plaid hot dog someday at the Rainbow Zoo.

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Zack Rogow

Zack Rogow

ZACK ROGOW, author of The Number Before Infinity: Poems (Scarlet Tanager), has published fourteen books, including six collections of poetry, three anthologies, four volumes of translation, and a children’s book. He is the author of two plays, including La Vie en Noir: The Art and Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor. He is the editor of an anthology of U.S. poetry, The Face of Poetry, published by University of California Press; and editor of two volumes of TWO LINES: World Writing in Translation, distributed by University of Washington Press. He has translated from the French works by George Sand, Colette, and André Breton.

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The Number Before Infinity
Kurt Schweigman

Kurt Schweigman

KURT SCHWEIGMAN, co-editor of Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2016), has published and performed as Luke Warm Water in the past. His poetry appears in Shedding Skins: Four Sioux Poets (Michigan State University Press, 2008). He has authored several chapbooks, one of which was awarded an Artists Embassy International Literary/Cultural Award (2013). Kurt was a featured poet at the prestigious Geraldine R. Dodge 12th Biennial Poetry Festival (2008) and was the first spoken-word poet to receive an Archibald Bush Foundation individual artist fellowship in literature (2005). He emerged on the poetry spoken-word scene in the late 1990s and has won several Poetry Slam competitions across the United States and in Germany. He currently resides in Oakland, California. Kurt is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Tribe.

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Red Indian Road West
John Teton

John Teton

JOHN TETON was born in Chicago and earned degrees from Harvard and the San Francisco Art Institute. He directed the award-winning short films Thunder Head Clearing and B’raesheet and produced the cosmology film program Visions at T Minus Zero. In addition to The Book of Geezer, his fiction includes Appearing Live at The Final Test, Upsurge, and ELEVATION: The Cave Logs of New Hale, Tibet. He is the founding director of the International Food Security Treaty Association, which arose from notes for Upsurge. On behalf of the IFST, he has made many public appearances at universities and U.S. Congressional briefings, and was featured as a non-government presenter in conjunction with the annual plenary session of the United Nations Committee on World Food Security in Rome. He has written numerous articles including “On the Origin of a Hunger-Free Species,” published in the Harvard International Review, and “The Armless Hand” for the Yale Journal of International Affairs. He and his wife, Jennifer, are the parents of three and live in Oregon.

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The Book of Geezer
Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez

Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez

GEORGIANA VALOYCE-SANCHEZ, author of A Light to Do Shellwork By: Poems (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2022), is a descendant of Islander and Coastal Chumash Peoples from her father’s lineage, and O’odham (Akimel and Tohono) from her mother’s lineage. She is currently an enrolled member of The Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation and chair of the Chumash Women’s Elders Council for the Wishtoyo Foundation. She taught many different classes for the American Indian Studies Program at California State University, Long Beach, including two classes she designed: “World Genocides: An American Indian Perspective,” with graduate student Anna Nazarian-Peters, and “Conduits of California Indian Cultures: Art, Music, Dance and Storytelling.” She retired from CSULB in 2014, after twenty-seven years. She was a board member for many years at the California Indian Storytelling Association, and she continues to be an advocate for California Indian languages and sacred sites. Her poem “I Saw My Father Today” is on display at the Embarcadero Muni/BART station as one of twelve poems cast in bronze and placed prominently in San Francisco. 

Book

A Light To Do Shellwork By
Judy Wells

Judy Wells

JUDY WELLS was born in San Francisco, the great-granddaughter of Irish immigrant Edward Rodgers (MacCrory), from Gortin, Co., Tyrone, and Letitia Kinney of Philadelphia. She received her B.A. from Stanford and her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley.

Everything Irish, her sixth poetry collection, was published by Scarlet Tanager Books in 2000. Her second Scarlet Tanager collection, Call Home, appeared in 2005. Her previous collections include The Calling: 20th Century Women Artists and Other Poems (Mother’s Hen, 1994) and The Part-Time Teacher (Rainy Day Women Press, 1991), a comic tale of her odyssey as a part-time college instructor in the San Francisco Bay Area.

She has also written a series of essays entitled A Vegetarian in Ireland, based on three trips to Ireland to search for her roots. Her essay, “Daddy’s Girl,” has appeared in several editions of the Borzoi College Reader (Alfred A. Knopf) and an Irish essay, “The Sheela-na-Gigs,” was published in Travelers’ Tales Ireland. Judy is co-editor, with Marsha Hudson, Bridget Connelly, Doris Earnshaw, and Olivia Eielson, of The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon (McFarland).

Books

Call Home
Everything Irish
Andrena Zawinski

Andrena Zawinski

ANDRENA ZAWINSKI is the editor of Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down (Scarlet Tanager, 2012). Her collection of poetry Something About (Blue Light Press, 2009) is a 2010 recipient of a PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Award and her collection Traveling in Reflected Light (Pig Iron Press,1995) received a Kenneth Patchen Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary publications—including Many Mountains MovingNimrodRattleSlipstreamQuarterly West, Gulf Coast, and Progressive Magazine—and have been widely anthologized.

Zawinski has been a longtime feminist and activist in the Women Against Violence Against Women Movement. She founded and organizes the San Francisco Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon. She is also Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com.

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Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down