Deborah Shapiro

Debbie Shapiro has been nursing and now nurturing the poet within for a long time. Poetry at times, threatened to die within her due to devaluating its importance in her life but lately she has recognized that poetry, for her, is one of the most intimate and intense communications a being can try to share with someone else: a way to share universes of being, observing,hoping and dreaming. Using the aesthetics of poetry, Deborah strives to enlighten and enliven herself and hopefully others. Having studied many years as an Educator and a Minister, and more recently embarking on public speaking through Toastmasters, she is working to incorporate her abilities as a poet and writer to bring about increased understanding and improved conditions by tapping into a Spirit of Play.

Carmelita

A native Angeleno, of multicultural and artistic heritage, she was a child protégée beginning her artistic journey by age four as a visual artist, then becoming a self taught classical pianist by age nine, vocalist and Manipuri dancer. She was awarded the Ross Spayne Perry art scholarship at U.S.C. during the exhibition of her art work at Fisher Gallery. She graduated with a B.F.A. from U.S.C., and later received a Master of Science Degree from Pepperdine. She became a L.A.U.S.D. premier art instructor guiding numerous students to receive art scholarships and awards for many years.

Her plans include completing her mother's unfinished manuscripts of children's stories and poetry as well as her own works.

A member of Artists for a Better World, Sharing Friends of the Arts, the Hollywood Arts Council, she also was a founding member of the Pre-Grammy Gala, is founder of the Rose Breast Cancer Society, a 501.c3 non-profit organization in memory of her mother Juanita Zara Espinosa Uddin, who cultivated roses. Carmelita has vowed to fight breast cancer through the arts, and uses the rose and rising Phoenix bird as a symbol of hope that women and men may grow a full and fruitful life. Her work has been recognized by Mayor James Hahn with a commendation 2005 and Congresswoman Diane Watson of the House of Congress. The Celebrity Centre International will host the 9th Annual Rose Variety Arts Show benefit for the Rose Breast Cancer Society to be held the first Sunday May 7, 2006.

Leslie Silton - Event Producer

Someone asked me just a few days ago if anyone knew of my work. I did a quick calculation and added it up, (fingers and toes working like an abacus): it comes to a few million people at least. Boy, was that was a shock. The truth is that I am both a visual artist and a poet. I also write short stories and do photography. In the past few years I've started working with collage and lately I'm now both a muralist and working on my first novel. My career as a poet started back in Greenwich Village, (New York City) in 1964, when I began showing up at the only coffeehouse I knew about - Le Metro - and I was nudged onto the stage to read my poems. It turns out that Alan Ginsberg (the Beat Poet) used to come in there (I didn't know who he was) and he asked me to contribute a page of poems (it was done on mimeo paper in those days) for his irregularly issued "Ninth Street Poets" magazine. Since then I've participated in many readings and open mics over the past 30-plus years both here in the USA and Paris, France when I attended American Center for Students and Artists. The emphasis for me has been in performance. But poets need chapbooks because you can't carry a live poet around in your hip pocket … so I have self-published 3 chapbooks so far (with more to come). Also, my poetry has been spread around by others - as when someone says to me: can I send that poem to my friends? (…all 153, 277 or 841 of them…) Sure. Therefore, since 1998 my work has been published on the internet quite a few times and that doesn't include the times I've sent work out, both solicited and unsolicited. I have read my poetry on radio programs in Los Angeles, Boston, and Miami. In the last couple of years several of my poems were recorded for different CD collections and read aloud either by myself or others on the radio on both coasts. Three of my short stories were recorded and broadcast the cable radio network here in Los Angeles.

Theresa Antonia

Peter Ludwin

My writing influences are multiple and varied. My long association with American folk music is one. A sense of music, rhythm and vividness of focus is important to me in terms of what I try to incorporate into my writing. Certainly the natural world, especially those parts of it that manifest immense space, is another major influence. It has for me a definite spiritual dimension.

As far as other poets, I would list Theodore Roethke, Rilke, Gary Snyder, James Dickey, James Wright, the critical essays of Robert Creeley and Robert Bly, some of Ezra Pound's writings, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Mark Doty and, most recently, the Chinese-American poet, Arthur Sze. The Spanish language poets have been especially important to me. The last four years I've participated in a week-long poetry workshop in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico--the single biggest boost to my writing I've had. Some of the instructors I've worked under include Mark Doty, Cornelius Eady, Forrest Gander, C.D. Wright, Alastair Reid, Marjorie Agosin, Alfred Corn and X.J. Kennedy. My poems have appeared in numerous journals, most prominently the Antitam Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Coal City Review, Illya's Honey, Karumu, Hurricane Review, Lullwater Review, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Raven Chronicles, Lake Effect, Small Pond Magazine of Literature, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review and Whiskey Island Magazine.

Alice Pero

Alice Pero's work has been published or in many magazines and anthologies, including Studio One, Sanskrit, Fox Cry Review, Carquinez Review, Three Mile Harbor, Salonika, San Gabriel Valley Quarterly, Word Thursday, Très diverse-city, Albatross, Lummox and The California Quarterly. She has won two poetry prizes from the National League of American Pen Women and an award from the California State Poetry Society. Ms. Pero is also a teacher of poetry and has done workshops for schoolchildren for 14 years. She founded the poetry reading, Moonday with poet Anne Silver in 2002 which is held once a month at Village Books in Pacific Palisades. Her first book of poetry, Thawed Stars, published in 1999, was hailed by Kenneth Koch as having "clarity and surprises." Lyn Lifshin has said, "Alice Pero's poems are deliciously open, brimming with leaps, twists and surprises, often joyful and fizzy as a fireworks display."

The romance of discovery, the radiant brilliance, the surprise and laughter are all here in Alice Pero's deeply intelligent insights into the edge of things.

~The Book Reader, America's Most Independent Review of Books

Don Campbell

DON KINGFISHER CAMPBELL is the founder of POETRYpeople youth writing workshops, publisher of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly, leader of the Emerging Urban Poets writing and Wednesday Afternoon Critique workshops, and host of Monday Night Poetry in Pasadena, California. He is the recipient of the National Writers Association's Los Angeles Chapter Author Of The Month Certificate, the Artists For A Better World Spirit Of Youth Award, an Honorable Mention in the Pathetic.org 9/11 poetry contest, the Pennsylvania State Poetry Society's Charles Ferguson Prize, and an Arroyo Arts Collective's Poetry In The Windows Prize. His poetry has been recently published in the anthologies Free-Wheeling, Prism Quarterly, Open Windows, Cookies And Poetry, Dirt, Cosmic Brownies, Three Chord Poems, Midnight Mind Number Five, So Luminous The Wildflowers, and One Drop To Be The Color Black; and is also viewable on the internet at the Tattoo Highway, Poetry Midwest, River Walk, New Verse News, Poets Against The War, Hiss Quarterly, Poetic Diversity, Edifice Wrecked, Call To Arts, Lunarosity, Writer's Hood, Poetic Voices, MindFire Renewed, Poetry Super Highway, Wilmington Blues, Bonfire, and Poetz websites. His first book of poetry "Enter", reviewed as "pithy, trenchant, raw with life", was published by iUniverse Press and is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, etc. You can even find him interviewed on Litrave.com and Poetix.net.

Homepage: http://home.earthlink.net/~sensitive/sensitivepoetry

Tamir Hendelman - Poetry on Piano

As a member of the Jeff Hamilton Trio and the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra Award-winning jazz pianist Tamir Hendelman has performed with today’s top performers including Diana Krall, Harry Allen, Teddy Edwards, Warren Vache, Houston Person, and Barbara Morrison. He premiered John Clayton's new orchestration of Oscar Peterson's Canadiana Suite in the Hollywood Bowl.

Russell Salamon

Russell Salamon is the author of eleven books of poetry and one poetic novel, Descent into Cleveland. His work has appeared in Passager, Sunstone, Uncommon Ground, Daybreak, The Listening Eye, Saint Petersburg Russian-American Anthology, Peckerwood, Puckerbrush Review, Retooling for the Renaissance in the Third Millennium among others. He is the winner of the Passager Prize for 1996 and has performed his poetry at the Cleveland Bicentennial Celebration. He serves on the editorial board for California Quarterly, published by the California State Poetry Society. He has been a featured reader at many venues in the Southern California area including Beyond Baroque, Autry Museum of Western Heritage, Mission Viejo Public Library and Bakersfield Art Gallery.

The Inevitable Press, Laguna Poets Series # 213, produced Breeze Hunting for the featured reading in Laguna Beach in 2001. He lives in North Hollywood, California, and is currently working on a collection of poems, Woodsmoke and Green Tea, soon to be published by deep cleveland press. He may be contacted at: thesalamons@eartlink.net

R.G. Cantalupo

r. g. cantalupo makes his living as a non-fiction writer, playwright and teacher. His work has appeared in over a hundred journals in the United States, England, and Canada, most recently appearing in The Wisconsin Review, The Southern Review, Rattle, and 2 AM among others. His books of poetry include Involving Residence, Private Entries, The God Box, and The Far Reading. He has also written a non-fiction memoir, The Light Where Shadows End, and recently completed his first novel, You Don't Know Me. His play Heart recently won first prize at the Western Regional of the American College Theater Festival and was presented at the Kennedy Center. He teaches at Mesa State University in Colorado.

Shirley Windward

Shirley Windward, born in Washington, DC, has lived through several wars, moved forty-three times, given up three libraries, traveled extensively abroad and in the States, and has taught English in both public and private schools. She lives in the Los Angeles area with her family, sings with a madrigal chorus, and publishes her poetry in local anthologies. She has also published one novel, called "Midwife Chronicles", and her most recent book, written with Audrey Hargreaves, is a small anthology of poetry titled "Slipping Honey In." Concomitant with her continued writing, she also does professional readings of her own work and that of others. Her present files contain several fantasies, three plays, twenty short stories -- and at least 800 poems, still arriving almost daily.

Lois P. Jones

Her work has been published in the recent anthology, Poets Gone Wild (Wild Poetry Press), The California Quarterly, The American Tanka Society, Prairie Poetry, and others. In Spring of 2005 at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lois presented a selection of poetry composed in collaboration with Deborah Levasseur Lottman for her graduate thesis--a synthesis of modern dance, poetry, photography and sound. She was also selected as one of the Regional Poets in this years Ojai Poetry Festival.

An avid supporter of the arts, Lois believes that artists can never receive enough support and encouragement. She is Workshop Moderator at wildpoetryforum.com and can be read online as Guest Poet on Words and Pictures.