East Bay Booksellers is excited to welcome back our friends from Poetry Flash. Terese Svoboda will be discussing her book Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet.
Author, poet, and memoirist Teresa Svoboda takes the reader on a fascinating journey from Ridge's childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand, to her years as a budding writer in Sydney, Australia, to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Once considered one of the most popular poets of her day, Ridge later fell out of critical favor due to verse that looked head on at the major issues of her time. This lively portrait is a who's who of all the key players in the arts, literature, and radical politics of the time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center. Now more than ever this biography offers inspiration to all those engaged in dissenting literature of our time and the movements that have inspired this renaissance of literary activism that we are seeing today.
Heather June Gibbons's debut book of poems is Her Mouth as Souvenir, which won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, she has also authored two chapbooks, Sore Songs and Flyover. Widely published in literary journals, she has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Vermont Studio Center. She teaches at San Francisco State University.