RHP at the Annenberg Beach House

Red Hen Press celebrates poetry and culture at the historic Annenberg Beach House, a gold coast gem that overlooks the ocean and once housed the stars of the golden era of Hollywood. Past readers include Camille T. Dungy, a two-time NAACP Image Award nominee whose Suck on the Marrow won a 2011 American Book Award, Steve Kistulentz, author of the 2009 Benjamin Saltman Award winning The Luckless Age, and Douglas Kearney, whose work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, Nocturnes, Washington Square, Jubilat, MiPOesias, Ninth Letter; Saints of Hysteria, The Ringing Ear, and Spoken Word Revolution Redux.

Annenberg Community Beach House
415 Pacific Coast Highway
Santa Monica, CA

These events are FREE and open to the public
Parking is $4/hour & $8/day
Click here for reservations
or call 310.458.2257

Upcoming Event
September 13, 2011
6:30 PM

Featuring

Susan Straight’s latest novel Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best novels of 2010 by The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Kirkus. Highwire Moon was a Finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, and A Million Nightingales was a 2006 Finalist for the LATimes Book Prize. Her short story “The Golden Gopher,” a chapter in the novel, won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. She has published stories and essays in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Harpers, Salon, Zoetrope, McSweeneys, The Believer, Black Clock, and elsewhere. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family.

Marcos Villatoro is the author of nine books. He has won numerous prizes, including two Emmy Awards for his PBS Television essays. His first Romilia Chacón thriller was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001. Villatoro was born in San Francisco and raised in Tennessee. He has spent much of his life in Central America (in his other country, El Salvador). Villatoro is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Writing at Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles, where he lives. The Romilia Chacón books have been published in five languages: English, German, Russian, Portuguese, and Japanese.

Rob Roberge is the author of the upcoming book of stories Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life, the neo-noir novels More Than They Could Chew (Perennial Dark Alley/Harper Collins, February 2005) and Drive (re-issue, Hollyridge Press, 2006). His stories have been featured in ZYZZYVA, Chelsea, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the “Ten Writers Worth Knowing Issue” of The Literary Review. His work has also been anthologized in Another City (City Lights, 2001), It’s All Good (Manic D Press, 2004) and SANTI: Lives of the Modern Saints (Black Arrow Press, 2007). New work is scheduled to appear in Penthouse and OC Noir, part of the series that includes San Francisco Noir, LA Noir and Las Vegas Noir. He has written columns for myrareguitars.com, caughtinthecarousel.com, and sandm.com. Rob also teaches writing at a number of programs in the Los Angeles area, including the Antioch University Los Angeles, MFA in Creative Writing and the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where he received the Outstanding Instructor Award in Creative Writing in 2003.

Josh Pryor earned his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and is currently a member of the English faculty at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California. His deep fascination with the natural world and cutting edge science is evident in much of his work, including the nationally recognized novel Monkey in the Middle. Though primarily a fiction writer, it is the complex nature of reality and humankind’s role in the universe that holds for him the greatest intrigue. In his spare time, Josh extensively researches alternative theories in cryptozoology, history, evolution and technology. Currently, Josh is researching a book of historical fiction chronicling the life and work of famed occultist, Aleister Crowley, of whom he is a direct descendant.

Most Recent Event
August 2, 2011
6:30 PM

Featuring

Matthew Shenoda is a writer and educator who has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Shenoda’s collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press, 2005), was named one of 2005’s debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine, and won the Hala Maksoud Award for Emerging Voice and a 2006 American Book Award. His latest collection is Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2009). Currently he is Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity and Professor in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. Additionally, Shenoda serves on Board of Directors of the Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts and is Director of Poetry for the Planet at the Wangari Maathai Center for Economic, Educational & Environmental Design.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship. It was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year in 2004 by ForeWord magazine. He co-founded Poets For Peace and he currently teaches Contemporary World Poetry, Creative Writing, and Literary Translation in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University.

Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Honey and Junk (W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), a collection of poems. She teaches literary nonfiction, with an emphasis on new media, at the University of Southern California, and is a co-founder of Figment, a youth-oriented mobile platform for reading and writing fiction.

Alice Quinn was the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker for over 20 years from 1987-2007. She is also director of the Poetry Society of America and a professor of poetry at the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York. Before joining the magazine she worked as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf publishers, where she edited the Knopf Poetry Series, as well as works of fiction by Ann Arensberg, Steven Millhauser, and Celia Gittelson, as well as works of non-fiction, including Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture.