Sunday, November 11th – 2:00 pm

Katherine Hastings grew up in the Cow Hollow neighborhood of San Francisco, a city that has deeply influenced her poems.  She is the author of Cloud Fire (Spuyten Duyvil NYC, 2012) and several chapbooks, including Updraft (Finishing Line, 2010).  Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and other publications including The Book of Forms — A Handbook of Poetics, Lewis Turco, ed. (2012); the Comstock Review; Parthenon West Review; Rattle; Beatitude Golden Anniversary; Calyx; and many others.  She is the host of WordTemple on NPR affiliate KRCB FM and curator of the WordTemple Poetry Series in Sonoma County, Ca.  Her Small Change Series of WordTemple Press has published beat poet David Meltzer, San Francisco poet laureate emerita devorah major, and many others, as well as the anthology What Redwoods Know — Poems from California State Parks (all proceeds benefit the State parks).  In June 2012, she became the Director of the new non-profit, WordTemple.  She lives in Sonoma County, CA with her partner, CJ Rayhill, and Chihuahua, Gizmo Federíco Garcia Lorca.

Toni Mirosevich is well known locally as a teacher in the Creative Writing program at SFSU, and for her vital voice in poetry.  She grew up in Everett, Washington, in a Croatian-American fishing family, part of an extensive immigrant Slav community, and her first jobs—as a truck driver, attic insulator and weatherizer, swimming pool operator, blood bank mobile unit operator, janitor, and handyperson—were viewed as nontraditional work fields for women when she embarked on them in the 1970s.  Her family & work experience are one with her work in poetry.

In her early thirties, she received her M.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University, where she began teaching as a lecturer in creative writing in 1991.

Firebrand Books published her first book of poetry and prose, The Rooms We Make Our Own, in 1996. That same year, Mirosevich became Associate Director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives. Her book of poetry, Queer Street (Custom Words) was published in 2005. Another poetry collection, My Oblique Strategies, won the 2005 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award and was published by Thorngate Road. In 2007, her collection of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest was published by Mid-List Press, received The First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award and was a Lambda Literary Finalist. She has been the recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award, Pushcart Prize and Lambda Literary Award nominations, and has received fellowship support from the MacDowell Colony, the Willard R. Espy Foundation, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and Blue Mountain Center.

Toni writes and teaches in multiple genres. Her award-winning work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Gastronomica, Puerto del Sol, UTNE, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and various other publications. Poems and nonfiction stories have been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, The Impossible Will Take A Little While, The Discovery of Poetry, Best of the Bellevue Literary Review and elsewhere.