Annenberg Beach House Poetry Reading

Kim Dower was born and raised in New York City and received a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught creative writing. Her first collection of poetry, Air Kissing on Mars (Red Hen Press, 2010), was on the Poetry Foundation’s Contemporary Best Sellers list, and her second, Slice of Moon (Red Hen Press, 2013), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Last Train to the Missing Planet was released by Red Hen Press this spring. Her work has been featured in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writer’s Almanac,” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” as well as in Barrow Street, Eclipse, The Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, and the anthology Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books / Pacific Coast Poetry Series, 2015). The founder of the Literary Publicity Company, Kim-from-L.A., she lives in West Hollywood, California.

A founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and the journal burntdistrict, Liz Kay holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she was the recipient of both an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Wendy Fort Foundation Prize for exemplary work in poetry. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Nimrod, Willow Springs, The New York Quarterly, Iron Horse Literary Review, Redactions, and Sugar House Review. Liz's debut novel, Monsters: A Love Story, will be published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 2016. Liz lives in Omaha, NE with her husband and 3 sons.

Seema Reza is a poet and essayist based outside of Washington, DC, where she coordinates and facilitates a unique hospital arts program that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. Her work has appeared online and in print in The Beltway Quarterly, HerKind, Duende, Pithead Chapel and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency among others. An alumnus of VONA and Goddard College, she was awarded the 2015 Col John Gioia Patriot Award by USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with service members.

The current Poet Laureate of Missouri, William Trowbridge is the author of six full poetry collections and three chapbooks. His new collection, Tilt-A-Whirl, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2016. His poems have appeared in more than thirty-five anthologies and textbooks, as well as in numerous publications including The Writer’s Almanac, and American Life in Poetry, and his awards include an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, a Camber Press Poetry Chapbook Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, Yaddo, and The Anderson Center. He lives in the Kanas City area, where he teaches in the University of Nebraska Low-Residency MFA in Writing Program.

Tess Taylor grew up in Berkeley, California, where she led youth garden programming at the Berkeley Youth Alternatives Community Garden and interned in the kitchen at Chez Panisse. In her twenties, she dropped out of Amherst College to become a translator and chef’s assistant at L’Ecole Ritz Escoffier in Paris. An avid gardener and cook, she is also an acclaimed poet. Her chapbook The Misremembered World was selected by Eavan Boland and published by the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Tess is currently the on air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College.