Santa Barbara Poetry Conference March 2008

Experience a weekend of Poetry w/ PHILIP LEVINE

March 28-30, 2008

Pulitzer prize-winning poet Philip Levine will be the featured poet March 28-30, 2008 for a special weekend in the beautiful foothills of Santa Barbara. Levine’s most recent collection of poems, Breath, was published in 2004. (Alfred A. Knopf).

All poets – from aspiring beginners to published sages – are welcome to join a weekend of workshops, seminars and readings. Levine will do a reading on Saturday night and offer a master class for all participants on Sunday morning.

Workshops throughout the weekend will be offered by SBWC’s poetry workshop leaders Perie Longo, (Santa Barbara’s new poet laureate) Christopher Buckley and David Starkey, as well as accomplished poets and instructors Ellen Kelley, Lois Klein, Marilyn McEntyre, Santa Barbara’s first poet laureate Barry Spacks, Paul Willis, and Chryss Yost.

Cost for the weekend is $325 for commuter students. This includes all workshops and lunches and dinners from Friday dinner through Sunday lunch. For those who wish to stay at the retreat center, the cost is $495 for a double-occupancy room and all meals. (Single occupancy is also available for $595). For more information on seminar topics and workshop leaders contact us via email.

You can find a list of additional Santa Barbara-area lodging options here.

For more information about the Santa Barbara Poetry Conference and assorted poetry weekends planned thorughout the year, or the SB Writers Conference in June, go here.

About Philip Levine:

Philip Levine was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1928. He is the author of sixteen books of poetry, most recently Breath (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). His other poetry collections include The Mercy (1999); The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is (1991), which won the National Book Award; New Selected Poems (1991); Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the first American Book Award for Poetry; 7 Years From Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; and The Names of the Lost (1975), which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

In a review of Breath, Levine’s most recent collection, Publishers Weekly wrote: “Levine writes gritty, fiercely unpretentious free verse about American manliness, physical labor, simple pleasures and profound grief, often set in working-class Detroit (where Levine grew up) or in central California (where he now resides), sometimes tinged with reference to his Jewish heritage or to the Spanish poets of rapt simplicity (Machado, Lorca) who remain his most visible influence.”

Levine has also published a collection of essays, The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography (1994), edited The Essential Keats (1987), and co-edited and translated two books: Off the Map: Selected Poems of Gloria Fuertes (with Ada Long, 1984) and Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines (with Ernesto Trejo, 1979).

Levine has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize from Poetry, the Frank O’Hara Prize, and two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. For two years he served as chair of the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. He lives in New York City and Fresno, California, and teaches at New York University.