California Burning: SoCal and Sierra

California Burning: SoCal and Sierra, sponsored by Inlandia Institute, will feature 20 Southern California contributors from two anthologies: California Fire & Water and Fire & Rain: Ecopoetry of California. The Inlandia Institute provides cultural programming and workshops throughout the Inland region.

About the editors:

Lucille Lang Day is the author of seven full-length poetry collections and four poetry chapbooks. Her latest collection is Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place (Blue Light Press, November 2020). She has also coedited two anthologies, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, and published two children's books and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and ten Pushcart Prize nominations. The founder and publisher of Scarlet Tanager Books, she received her MA in English and MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her BA in biological sciences, MA in zoology, and PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Ruth Nolan grew up in California's Mojave Desert and worked as a wildland firefighter for the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service during the 1980s. She is coeditor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, which placed as a finalist for the 2019 Eric Hoffer Book Award in Poetry, and editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California's Deserts. Her writing has been published/is forthcoming in Boom, CaliforniaWomen's Studies Quarterly; KCET L.A.; News from Native California; Desert Oracle; Sierra Club Desert Report; Los Angeles Times; Desert Sun/USA Today. She is curator of the documentary project Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California, which has been the recipient of grants from College of the Desert, Phi Kappa Phi, and the California Writers Residency/ 1888 Center program. Ruth is Professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert.

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's the author of The More Difficult BeautyListening to Winter, and Houston, We Have a Possum among other books and has won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills, where she teaches writing to cancer patients, provides weekly commentary to community radio, and works as a radical life coach.