New Author
The winner of the first annual poetry competition is Rebekah Edwards. Edwards has won many awards for her poetry including; the Joseph Phelan Award for Poetry, San Francisco Foundation; the Eisner Award for Poetry, University of California at Berkeley; the Editor’s Prize, New Delta Review; the State of California Ina Coolbrith Award in Poetry; the Mary Merritt Henry Award for Poetry, Mills College; and the Malcolm Wood Writing Award, California College of Arts. She holds creative and scholarly degrees from Mills College and the University of California, Berkeley.
Who We Are: Current Editors
Anne F. Walker is the publishing editor for the press. Her books include The Exit Show, Into the Peculiar Dark, Pregnant Poems, and Six Months Rent. On her aesthetic choices she writes: “Rather than link myself with one particular school of poetics I utilize fusion. I see value in a tremendous range of forms and explorations.”
Competition editors for the 2011-12 book(s) are Angela Szczepaniak, Susan Varnot, and Paul Gibbons.
Angela Szczepaniak has been an editor with Redwood Coast Press for the press since 2008. She is a PhD Candidate at the University at Buffalo, neck-deep in a dissertation on innovative poetry, detective fiction, and comic books. Her first poetry book is Unisex Love Poems. Her second is The QWERTY Institute (Annual Report). She thinks of words as solid, tangible, almost like you can feel them on the tongue, savour them. She likes writers who engage playfully with the plasticity of language, so that pieces are surprising, exuberant, funny, repulsive… something that hits viscerally.
Susan Varnot’s poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Beloit Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry International, and Spoon River Review. Her work will also appear in A Face to Meet Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. She prizes a wide range of poetics, as her aesthetic choices embrace experimental to traditional poetic forms and voices.
Paul Gibbons teaches multiple genres of writing at the University of California at Merced. His publications include Bray, a chapbook, as well as appearances in journals such as Blackbird, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Born. He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In responding to poems, he gets the most from poems that contain imagery and yet turn surprisingly in multiple directions at once.
Who We Are: Emeritus
After Redwood Coast Press published Andrea Adolph’s first book, Improv (1994), Andrea joined the press to co-edit bite to eat place. She is currently Associate Professor of English at Kent State University, Stark Campus. She holds an MFA in creative writing, and publishes poetry and creative nonfiction regularly. Her recent book is Food and Femininity in Twentieth-Century British Women’s Fiction.
Julie Chisholm, a Redwood Coast Press contest editor for the first annual competition, is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Houston, where she received a Ph.D. in poetry and literature in 2002. Poems from her chapbook, “Snap-Shooting at Stars,” (Red Booth Press, 2003) won the James A. Michener Fellowship (judge Jean Valentine) in 2000. She is currently Assistant Professor of Composition and Rhetoric at Cal Maritime, a campus of the California State University system. She is particularly excited by poems that work together to form/hint at “spiritual ideologies.” Her favorite poet is Emily Dickinson.
Who We Are: bite to eat place authors
The complete list is here.
Who We Are: Community
Estee Schwartz is the Redwood Coast Press Communications Specialist. She lives in Oakland, CA, and is editor of Walrus, the Mills College literary review. Her poetry has been published in publications such as Try! and the West Wind Review. During her spare time, you can find her volunteering at Small Press Distribution.
Who We Are: Icon
Andrea Rosati’s image of redwood trees will be incorporated into our logo.
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