Gwendolyn Alley, Students Read in Ventura

At the end of each semester, after writing endless academic papers and book reviews too, my students and I create a class anthology of our recent creative work, and then many of us read from it at an open mic following the featured reader.

And this semester I am the featured reader!

Please join me on Thursday, May 5 at the EP Foster Library in the Topping Room at 7:30pm (651 E. Main Street, Ventura CA 93001) with host Phil Taggart, Ventura County’s Poet Laureate. An open mic follows, and it’s FREE! But they pass the hat… and I will be selling books!

I have six new poems that I have been working on; at least two of them will be in the student publications including this one, Gracie.

I will read maybe two or maybe more of the new poems; I’m preparing my reading now!

I do know that I am closing the reading with my “Water” poem with drum accompaniment from my friend and colleague Dr Robert Porter who will also be reading in the open mic. Because the open mic is one poem, no epics (better keep it under three minutes!) and the water poem is just over five minutes, I’ve only read one half of it or the other, so I’m really looking forward to doing the whole thing, especially with Bob on drums! Plus Bob plans on reading (and maybe drumming in the open mic!) And that’s something to look forward to!

Plus I plan on reading a few poems from my poetry collection, middle of the night poems from daughter to mother :: mother to son —maybe an oldie but a goodie like this one:

Here’s the bio I wrote for Phil:

Gwendolyn Alley teaches writing at Ventura College by day and by night she writes about wine for her blog, Wine Predator.

Gwendolyn studied writing at UC Santa Cruz with Al Young and Lucille Clifton where she earned undergraduate degrees in Environmental Studies and Literature/Creative Writing by writing a novel about her experience as one of the first women to hike the complete Pacific Crest Trail.

Gwendolyn has a Masters in English from the University of Nevada Reno and a Masters in Depth Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has been involved with the 315 experiment since 2001 and co edited with Danika Dinsmore between sleeps: the 3:15 experiment 1993- 2005. In 2012, en theos press published Middle of the night poems from daughter to mother :: mother to son. She also published three dozen broadsides in ArtLife.  

When she’s not sampling wine or spending time with her family at their home near the beach in Ventura, you’ll find Gwendolyn in the Sierras hiking, skiing, or soaking in hot springs.

As we writers are all busy revising our work,  I thought these 10 Writing tips from Josh Bernoff just might be helpful:

And some how THIS is Post 1751… with almost 101,000 unique visitors who have checked out almost 625,000 posts and pages since I started this blog November 2007!  And on Wine Predator, I’m about to publish my 500th blog post! While this post is only 450 words, most of them range from 750-1000 or more words. So does that means I’ve written and published over 2 million words? wow!