Sacramento Poetry Center

The Londonberry Salon
with
Shawn Pittard, Christina Hutchins, Gregory Randall, Toni Wilkes, Roy Mash, and Mary Petrosky
Monday, August 23 at 7:30 PM
Sacramento Poetry Center — 1719 25th St.
Crossroads for the Arts at 25th and R Street

About the Larkfield Review:
from editors, Gregory W. Randall and Toni L Wilkes

In June of 2009, our desire to provide space for local or regional poets manifested itself in an inaugural volume of The Larkfield Review. The anthology featured four poets who read for the spring Poets We Know Londonberry Salon. The criteria was simple: to bring together friends and acquaintances laboring away at the craft of poetry who had not yet had the opportunity to publish a full-length manuscript of poems.

In the end, we brought together Shawn Pittard’s luminous imagery springing from everyday experiences in the Sacramento Valley and foothills with Mary Petrosky’s re-imagined histories and lives of figures in old Argentine photographs with Roy Mash’s playful and humorous take on objects we so often take for granted–fingers, playground antics–with Christina Hutchins’ shimmering lyricism weaving together love and the realm of nature, a weave that “blooms and revises the world.”

Shawn Pittard is the author of These Rivers—a chapbook of poems from Rattlesnake Press. His poems have most-recently appeared on-line in Convergence and In Posse Review, and in print in the North American Review. He co-wrote a screenplay, Junk Sick, with his brother, Trent, and divides his time between his home in Sacramento, California and his family’s cabin outside Flagstaff, Arizona.

Christina Hutchins teaches poetry and Whitehead’s philosophy at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. With degrees from UC Davis, Harvard, and Graduate Theological Union, she has worked as a biochemist and a Congregational (UCC) minister. Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Denver Quarterly, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, and The Missouri Review. She has won the 2010 Annie Finch Prize of The National Poetry Review, the 2010 Robin Becker chapbook prize of Seven Kitchens Press, the 2009 Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, the Villa Montalvo Poetry Prize, and she has received two Barbara Deming Awards for Women in Poetry and was selected by Robert Hass for a fellowship to the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. Christina is the Poet Laureate of Albany, CA. The Stranger Dissolves was chosen by Sixteen Rivers Press for publication in early in 2011.

Gregory W. Randall majored in English and Latin at St. Olaf College and spent innumerable hours in the music library.

Mark Doty selected Double Happiness for the 5th Annual Camber Press Chapbook Award for 2009. His chapbook A Room in the Country will be published by Pudding House Press in 2010 and Uncommon Refrains is forthcoming from The Lives You Touch Publications. Greg also received a 2009 Pushcart Prize nomination, and his chapbook Blue Water Views was recently accepted by Finishing Line Press.

First published by The Pedestal Magazine, his poem “Confessions of an Apothecary” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for 2008

His recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Bitter Oleander, CQ, Cream City, GW Review, Louisiana Literature, Louisville Review, Pedestal, Rosebud, Southern California Review, South Carolina Review, Sow’s Ear, Stand, and other noted journals.

Greg owns a financial planning practice with his wife Toni Wilkes in Santa Rosa, CA. []

Prior to relocating to Northern California, Toni L. Wilkes was a freelance screenwriter and fulltime story editor for feature film director Peter Hyams in Los Angeles. She is now a member of the California State Poetry Society and the Marin Poetry Center. Wilkes serves as a board member for the Sonoma County Library.

Wilkes is the author of Stepping Through Moons (Finishing Line Press, 2009). Her work appears or is forthcoming in California Quarterly, Confrontation, Cream City Review, Folio, GW Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Healing Muse, In Posse Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Pinyon, Poetry East, Roanoke Review, Rosebud, Southern Humanities Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Texas Review and other noted journals. She lives with her husband, Gregory Randall, in Santa Rosa, California where they own a financial planning practice.

Roy Mash is an electronics technician living in San Rafael. He is currently co-chair and webmaster for Marin Poetry Center. His poetry has been published in Agni, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Evansville Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Rhino and Two Review among others.

Mary Petrosky received her MFA from Antioch University, Los Angeles, and is a member of the Squaw Community of Writers. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines including Blackbird, Calyx, The Comstock Review, Tattoo Highway, Kalliope, and the Metronome of Aptekarsky Ostrov (published in St. Petersburg, Russia), as well as anthologies such as Above Us Only Sky: An Anthology of Atheist Poetry, The Larkfield Review, and Tweets from Arctos Press. A freelance technology writer, Petrosky lives in San Mateo, CA.