The sixth season of The Mission Poetry Series wraps up on Saturday, April 18th, at 1 p.m. in Santa Barbara, California, with “People, Earth, Sky, Stars: Two Poets in Spring” featuring nationally acclaimed poet Denise Duhamel and San Francisco poet and activist Paul Fericano.
WHAT: The Mission Poetry Series
WHEN: Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 1 p.m.
WHERE: Antioch University, 602 Anacapa Street, Santa Barbara, California, 93101
ADMISSION: Free
MORE: Refreshments, poets’ works for sale, complimentary broadsides
DENISE DUHAMEL‘s most recent book of poetry Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of a 2014 Paterson Poetry Prize. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner (winner of the Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997.) She is the recipient of awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013, she is a professor at Florida International University in Miami. ¶ Her poems have appeared in some of the country’s most prestigious literary journals, such as The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly, and her work has been translated most recently into Polish, Italian, Arabic, and Romanian. In 20008, Bartleby Editores, the leading Spanish-language press publishing poets in English, released a bilingual edition of her poems, Afortunada de mí (Lucky Me). Entertainment Weekly writer Ken Tucker has noted that her work is accessible and culturally relevant. “Learn and have fun while you read,” writes Tucker. “Using prose poems,
sonnets, sestinas, and other forms . . . Duhamel is a wily technician, a touching humanist, a poet deserving stardom.” He gives her book an “A.”
PAUL FERICANO is a poet, satirist, social activist, and community organizer born in San Francisco. He is the editor and cofounder of Yossarian Universal, the nation’s first parody news service, and the editor of The Broadsider, an ongoing project of limited-edition poetry broadsides showcasing previously published work by a diverse group of authors. His poetry has been widely anthologized and was featured in 2014 in Four By Two, a limited-edition handcrafted arts journal edited by poet and lyricist Klipschutz. His chapbook, The Hollywood Catechism, was one of thirteen chosen by Silver Birch Press of Los Angeles for Swallow Dance: An Anthology of Poetry Chapbooks (2014). His new and expanded collection, The Hollywood Catechism, was also published by Silver Birch Press in March 2015. ¶ Since 1971, his poetry and prose have appeared in literary and media outlets in this country and abroad, including Mother Jones, MiPoesias, The New York Quarterly, Poetry Now, Projector, The Realist, Saturday Night Live, SoHo Arts Weekly, Vagabond, The Wormwood Review, Charlie Hebdo (Paris), Punch (London), and others. Additional chapbooks and books of poetry and fiction include Cancer Quiz (Scarecrow Books, 1977), Commercial Break (Poor Souls Press, 1982), The One Minute President (with Elio Ligi / Stroessner Verlag, 1986), and Interview with the Scalia (Peabody Press, 1994). His 1977 collection, Loading the Revolver with Real Bullets, published by Second Coming Press and partly funded by the state of California, achieved notoriety in 1978, when one of its poems, “The Three Stooges at a Hollywood Party,” was read on the floor of the California State Senate as a reason to abolish the California Arts Council. He currently serves as director of Instruments of Peace (IOP), a nonprofit that focuses on healing and reconciliation for survivors of clergy sexual abuse, and writes an online column on these issues (“A Room With A Pew”). He is a resident of the San Francisco peninsula.
Silver Birch Press 
