Tuesday, February 19th: Major Jackson

Thursday, March 21st: C. K. Williams 

Wednesday, April 17th: Anne Carson

Tuesday, September 4: Annual Faculty Reading (with John Campion, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, C. S. Giscombe, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, and John Shoptaw as well as Holloway Poet-in-Residence, Catherine Walsh)

Thursday, September 20: David Marriott (co-presented with The Mixed Blood Project) reading with Yosefa Raz

Wednesday, October 3: Eavan Boland with Mary Wilson

Thursday, October 11: Holloway Reading with Catherine Walsh (reception to follow)

Tuesday, October 30: W. N. Herbert with Adrian Acu

Tuesday, November 13: Tony Lopez with Daniel Benjamin

Thursday, November 15: Keston Sutherland and John Wilkinson

Friday, November 16: Boundless Poetics (with US and UK poet-scholars)

LORNA DEE CERVANTES is an internationally acclaimed poet. Recipient of the Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Writers Award, 2 NEA Fellowship Grants, 2 Pushcart Prizes (another nominated this year) & “Best Book” awards for Emplumada (’81), From the Cables of Genocide: Poems on Love and Hunger (’91), and the 5-volume Drive: The First Quartet (’06) which was nominated for a Pulitzer, her new books are Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems (’11), Stunned into Being: Essays On the Poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes (’11), and the forthcoming Something of the Cruelest. A California native, born in The Mission, Cervantes was the former Director of Creative Writing at CU- Boulder where she was a Professor of English for 19 years. This year’s UC Regents Lecturer at Berkeley, she is home again in the Bay Area writing fiction, essays, poetry & screenplays.

Thursday, February 2: CLAUDIA RANKINE with SAMIA RAHIMTOOLA

CLAUDIA RANKINE co-edited the anthology American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and her work is included in several anthologies, including Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, Best American Poetry 2001, Giant Step: African American Writing at the Crossroads of the Century, and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth Century African-American Poetry. Her work has been published in numerous journals including Boston Review, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. She lives and teaches in California. She is the Holloway/Mixed Blood poet for the spring series.

Thursday, February 23: M. NOURBESE PHILIP with SERENA LEE

M. NOURBESE PHILIP is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who lives in the space-time of the City of Toronto. She practised law in the City of Toronto for seven years before leaving to write full-time. She has published poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction. Among her best known published works are She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks, Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence, and Harriet’s Daughter, a young adult novel. Her most recent work,Zong!, is a genre-breaking, book-length poem which engages with ideas of the law, history and memory as they relate to the transatlantic slave trade. She is our second Holloway/Mixed Blood poet for the spring series.
Thursday, March 8: MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH with DAVID VANDELOO

MARTIN CORLESS-SMITH was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. He is the author of English Fragments: A Brief History of the Soul, Swallows, Nota, Complete Travels, and Of Piscator. A limited edition chapbook, Roman and Moscow Poems, was published in 2011. He was Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and holds an MFA in Fine Arts and Printmaking from SMU and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University at Utah. He is currently the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Boise State University.

Tuesday, April 10: RON SILLIMAN with JILL RICHARDS

RON SILLIMAN attended UC Berkeley in 1970 & 71, receiving the Joan Lee Yang Award. Since wandering off in the middle of his senior year to perform “alternative service” as a conscientious objector, he has written and edited over 30 books, most recently Wharf Hypothesis from Lines Press, and has had his work translated into 12 languages. Silliman received the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2010, a distinction he shares with Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Robert Creeley, H.D., Yusef Komunyakaa, W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery. His sculpture, From Northern Soul (Bury Neon), is installed in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, where it is a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. Silliman has a plaque on Addison Avenue, slightly west of the Berkeley Rep, & grew up on Neilson Street in Albany.

The 2011-2012 Holloway Series begins the autumn season in poetry with a reading featuring UC Berkeley’s own celebrated poets and teachers. John Shoptaw, Lyn Hejinian, Cecil Giscombe, Robert Hass, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, John Campion, and Holloway visiting poet, Judith Goldman.

Thursday, October 13: JOHN TAGGART with MARGARET RHEE

JOHN TAGGART is the 2011 Holloway/Mixed Blood poet. Born in Iowa, raised in Indiana, and educated at Earlham College, University of Chicago, and Syracuse University. He edited the literary magazine Maps, and his first poems were published in Origin, thereafter, publishing fourteen books of poetry. A “selected” collection of the fourteen, Is Music, was published in 2010. His work includes a critical study of Edward Hopper and a collection of critical essays on contemporary poetry & poetics. His current projects: a study of Robert Duncan–and taking care of trees.

Tuesday, October 25: JEAN DAY with CLAIRE MARIE STANCEK

JEAN DAY has published seven books of poetry, including Enthusiasm: Odes & Otium and the chapbook Daydream (The Eponym). Poems from her current project, Late Human, have been published in Try and Cambridge Literary Review, and recent work has appeared in The Sienese Shredder, Zoland Poetry, Mir (in French), and other journals.

Tuesday, November 8: JUDITH GOLDMAN (visiting Holloway poet)

JUDITH GOLDMAN is the author of Vocoder (Roof 2001), DeathStar/rico-chet (O Books 2006), and l.b.; or, catenaries (Krupskaya 2011).  She co-edited the annual journal War and Peace with Leslie Scalapino from 2005-2009 and is currently Poetry Feature Editor for the academic web-journal Postmodern Culture.  From 2007-2011, she was a Harper Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.  In fall 2011, she is the visiting Holloway Poet at the University of California, Berkeley.
Friday, November 18: “THE GRAND PIANO”

A multi-vocal performance of The Grand Piano by co-authors Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Tom Mandel and Rae Armantrout. The Grand Piano is a 10-volume, collective autobiography that explores the seminal period of Language Poetry in San Francisco in the late 70s.
The performance will be followed by a discussion moderated by poet and critic Jasper Bernes.

Thursday, December 1: ANNE WALDMAN with JOCELYN SAIDENBERG

ANNE WALDMAN is the author of more than 40 books and has concentrated on the long poem as a cultural intervention with such projects as Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble,  Manatee/Humanity  (Penguin Poets) which is a book-length rhizomic meditation on evolution and endangered species, and the monumental anti-war feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press 2011).  Her anthologies include Nice To See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Beat Book, and co-edited collections Civil Disobediences and  The Angel Hair Anthology. She is the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award, and recently appointed a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

This legendary meditation on poetics, a central text of the San Francisco Renaissance and of the New American Poetics has been buried in fugitive literary magaznes and literary archives for several decades and is now appearing for the first time in its entirety in book form from the University of California Press. Join us to celebrate two poets and a publishing milestone. Featured readers: Michael Davidson, Michael Palmer, Brenda Hillma, Cecil Giscombe, Aaron Shurin, Robert Hass, Giovanni Singleton, Susan Thackery, Jane Gregory, and Gillian Osborne.

January 26: Arthur Sze with Javier Huerta

ARTHUR SZE is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Ginkgo Light, Quipu, The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998, Archipelago, and one book of translations, The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese. He is also the editor of Chinese Writers on Writing. A professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Arthur Sze is a UC Berkeley graduate and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

March 31: Carl Dennis with Rachel Beck

CARL DENNIS is the author of eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Callings (Penguin, 2010). A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize, he lives in Buffalo, New York.

April 6: Richard Tillinghast with Christopher Patrick Miller

RICHARD TILLINGHAST, an American poet who lives in Ireland, is the author of ten books of poetry and three non-fiction books. The most recent are The New Life, 2008, Sewanee Poems and Selected Poems, both 2009. He has received grants from the Irish Arts Council, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA and the NEH, and has held the Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship. He is currently working on a book about Istanbul.

April 20: Kimiko Hahn with Megan Pugh

KIMIKO HAHN, author of eight collections, finds her material from disparate sources–whether exhumation (The Artist’s Daughter) or classical Japanese texts (The Narrow Road to the Interior). Rarified fields of science trigger her latest work in Toxic Flora. Hahn has received a number of awards, most recently a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a distinguished professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Literary Translation at Queens College, CUNY.

The 2010-2011 Holloway Series begins the autumn season in poetry with a reading featuring UC Berkeley’s own celebrated poets and teachers. John Shoptaw, Lyn Hejinian, Cecil Giscombe, Robert Hass, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, and Holloway visiting poet, Matthew Zapruder.

September 16: Visiting Holloway Poet, Matthew Zapruder

MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of three collections of poetry: American Linden, The Pajamaist, and Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, Fall 2010), as well as co-translator from Romanian, along with historian Radu Ioanid, of Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu. He has received a William Carlos Williams Award, a May Sarton Award from the Academy of American Arts and Sciences, and a Lannan Literary Fellowship. An editor for Wave Books and a member of the permanent faculty in the low residency MFA program at UC Riverside-Palm Deser. He lives in San Francisco.

September 30: Harryette Mullen with Jocelyn Rodal

HARRYETTE MULLEN’s poetry books include Recyclopedia, winner of a PEN Beyond Margins Award in 2007, and Sleeping with the Dictionary, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle award, and was a National Book Award finalist in 2002. She currently lives in Los Angeles where she teaches American poetry, African American literature, and creative writing at UCLA. As the 2010 Holloway/Mix Blood Poet, she will give a talk titled “The Civil War: Masters vs. Slaves” (The Battle at Brice’s Crossroads and the Massacre at Fort Pillow).

October 19: Rachel Zolf with Katie Fleishman

RACHEL ZOLF’s poetic practice explores interrelated materialist questions concerning memory, history, knowledge, subjectivity and the conceptual limits of language and meaning. She is particularly interested in how ethics flounders on the shoals of the political. Her fourth full-length book, Neighbour Procedure, was released by Coach House Books in 2010. Previous collections include Human Resources (Coach House), which won the 2008 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, Masque (The Mercury Press), Shoot & Weep (Nomados), from Human Resources (Belladonna books) and Her absence, this wanderer (BuschekBooks). Born in Canada, she lives in Brooklyn.

November 4: Kenneth Irby with Charles Legere

KENNETH IRBY was born in Bowie, Texas, and grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas. He is a graduate of the University of Kansas, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He has variously lived, worked, served in the Army, and taught in New Mexico, Nevada, the North Pacific, California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado, and Denmark, and currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas, teaching in the Department of English at the University of Kansas. His recent book is The Intent On: Collected Poems 1962-2006 (North Atlantic Books, 2009). In 2010 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, sharing that with Eileen Myles.

November 19: Honoring Larry Eigner

When Larry Eigner arrived in this world “palsied from a hard birth” the accepted view was that the severity of his injury made him uneducable. An inspired bar-mitzvah gift of a 1940 Royal portable typewriter opened a pathway to his becoming a poet. This event celebrates the publication in four folio volumes of the Collected Poems of Larry Eigner.

POETS/SPEAKERS. Robert Grenier, Lyn Hejinian, Richard Eigner, Rebecca Gaydos, Kit Robinson, Michael Davidson, George Hart, Albert Gelpi, Hillary Gravendyk, Jack and Adelle Foley, Norma Cole, and Robert Hass.

November 30: Readings from Indivisible Anthology

Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010) is the first anthology to bring together American poets with roots in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Since Ralph Waldo Emerson first drew inspiration from the Sanskrit epic poem Bhagvad Gita, the poetic traditions of South Asia and the United States have been intertwined from Eliot to the Beats. A seminal anthology, Indivisible brings us up to date, presenting the work of contemporary American poets who trace their roots back to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and who are rewriting the cultural and literary landscape of America today.

POETS/EDITORS: Ravi Chandra, Summi Kaipa, Tanuja Mehrotra, Pireeni Sundaralingam, and graduate student poet, Swati Rana.

December 3: Memorial Reading for Leslie Scalapino

LESLIE SCALAPINO (July 25, 1944 – May 28, 2010) was a ground-breaking, genre-stretching author of 40 books of poetry, poem-plays, essays and fiction. Her books include; Selected Poems 1974-2006; Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows; Dihedrons-Gazelle, Dihedrals-Zoom; Flow-Winged Crocodile, A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear; and the novel, Defoe. A longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she was also the founder and publisher of O Books.
POETS/SPEAKERS. Lyn Hejinian, Simone Fattal, Michael McClure, Norma Cole, Laura Moriarty, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Judith Goldman, Konrad Steiner, Tracy Grinnell, Joanne Kyger, Norman Fischer, Alicia Cohen, Rae Armantrout, Stephen Ratcliffe, Michael Cross, M. Mara-Ann, and Bob Grenier.

February 19: Rob Fitterman with Samia Rahimtoola

March 5: A. B. Spellman with Nikhil Govind

April 2: Cyrus Console with Rebeka Edwards

February 28: Erin Moure with Trang Cao

March 21: Linh Dinh with Marisa Libbon

April 24: Ariana Reines with Angie Yuan

May 1: Visiting Holloway Poet, Lytle Shaw

September 11: Tom Pickard with Hillary Gravendyk

October 14: Michael McClure with Elizabeth Marie Young

October 30: D. S. Marriott with Adam Ahmed

November 12: Caroline Bergvall with Nina Pick

September 27: Rae Armontrout

October 4: Ted Pearson with Sookyoung Lee

October 31: Amiri Baraka with Michael Bigley

November 15: Rachel Levitsky with Gillian Osbourne