April is National Poetry Month: Read, Share, & Honor Poetry & Poets

April is National Poetry Month, a time when the Library honors the poetic spirit of our own community by providing a virtual space for people to share poetry. We honor and feature poets who are both published and unpublished, whose poems reflect all poetic styles. This is our second year in providing this virtual space for sharing poetry, and, like last year, we’ve already had another great response to this project. We want to thank all the poets who contributed video and audio clips of their work!
We will continue to post submissions throughout April, so if you are a poet or a poetry lover and want to contribute, please send us a video or an audio file (up to 10 minutes) of you either reading your own work, talking about your work, or reading the work of a poet who has inspired you. Send your submissions to the project’s creator, Christina Continelli at: ccontinelli@ucsd.edu.

Ndaba Sibanda (click on the photo to hear the poem)
Ndaba Sibanda is a Zimbabwean-born writer. He hails from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe`s second largest city. In 2005 he authored an epic, Love O’clock. He has since contributed to more than twelve published books including such international anthologies as Poems For Haiti, A South African anthology, Snippets, Voices Of Peace, Black Communion, Ripples of Love, Lost Coast Review, Summer 2014: Vol. 5, No. 3, On the Rusk Issue Three (Volume 3), Emanations: Foray into Forever, World Healing ~ World Peace Volume I: a poetry anthology (World Healing ~ World Peace 2014) (Volume 1), Metaphor: Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Volume 1), East Coast Literary Review: Spring Edition 2014 and Eccentric Press Poetry Anthology (Volume I): Omni Diuersitas.
Ndaba’s poems, essays and short stories have appeared in many and different journals and magazines like: The Piker Press, Bricolage, The Dying Goose, Lost Coast Review, Magazine ,Whispering Prairie Press, Saraba Magazine,allAfrica.com, Jungle Jim, Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine ,The Metric, Unlikely Stories, Santa Fe Writers Project – SFWP Journal, Elohi Gadugi – Elohi Gadugi Journal,The Subterranean Quarterly,Miracle ,The Joker, Florida Flash, Fjords Review, storySouth, Annapurna Magazine, Festival Of Language, quiet Shorts, The African Street Writer, Poetry Potion.com, Books Live , Whispers, and Poetrysoup. His latest anthology, The Dead Must Be Sobbing was published in March 2013. Sibanda`s debut novel, Timebomb has been accepted for publication in the UK.
He believes “it is right to write, and that writing is his life and second wife”.  Currently he lives in Saudi Arabia.

Rachel Winchester
Rachel Winchester

(click on the photo to hear the poems)
Rachel Winchester is a San Diego native and a long time performance artist in the mediums of dance, theatre, and poetry. She is currently a Lecturer at the University of Idaho, where she strives to create interdisciplinary performance experiences for her students. Rachel Winchester reads two poems: “Onset/First Love” and “Meditation Study”

Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi
Vikram pic

(Professor Dwivedi reads two of his poems: Death and Ecstasy)
Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi is university faculty and assistant professor of linguistics at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India; and author of two books on lesser known Indian languages: A Grammar of Hadoti and A Grammar of Bhadarwahi. As a poet, he has published around fifty poems in different anthologies, journals, and magazines worldwide. Until recently, his poem “Mother” has included as a prologue to Motherhood and War: International Perspectives (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan Press. 2014.

Lois Roma-Deeley
Lois Roma-Deely

(click photo to hear poem)
Lois Roma-Deeley, winner of the Samuel T. Coleridge Literary Prize, is the author of three collections of poetry, Rules of Hunger, northSight and High Notes. Her third collection, High Notes, was chosen as a Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist. She has published in many national anthologies, including Villanelles (Pocket Poets Series). Further, her work has been featured in numerous literary journals including, Spillway, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Hamilton Stone Review, Bellingham Review, 5 AM, Artful Dodge, Water~Stone, and many others. She was named a 2012-2013 U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation and CASE.
www.loisroma-deeley.com

Alex Bosworth

(click on photo for poem)
Alex Bosworth was born in San Diego in 1965. He began writing artistically in elementary school and has kept at it for forty years. His work has been influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and Edward Lear. Bosworth reads his work at coffeehouses and bookstores all over his hometown. He has been asked twice to read on behalf of San Diego Writers Ink at The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. A collection of his work, “Chip Chip Chaw” is available on Amazon.  The audio portion of the video on this link was recorded in The Loft at UCSD La Jolla in 2011.

Youssef Alaoui-Fdili
Youssef Alaoui-Fdili

(Youssef Alaoui-Fdili reads part of his book-length poem The Blue Demon, and another poem called The Eternal City of Mud )
Youssef Alaoui-Fdili is a Moroccan-American Latino. Most of his work can be understood as Magic Realism or Fabulist, due to prevailing themes of fantastical events taking place in ordinary circumstances. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He has an MFA in Poetics from New College of California. There, he studied Classical Arabic, Spanish Baroque and Contemporary Moroccan poetry. He is also well versed in the most dour and macabre literature of the 19th Century. His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Poems Niederngasse, Stark Raving Normal, 580 Split, Cherry Bleeds, Carcinogenic Poetry, Red Fez, Dusie Press, Rivet Magazine, and nominated for a Pushcart at Full of Crow. Youssef is an original creator of the East Bay literary arts festival “Beast Crawl.” youssefalaoui.tumblr.com

Jessica Goodfellow
Goodfellow

(click photo to hear poem)
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Mendeleev’s Mandala (Mayapple Press, 2015), The Insomniac’s Weather Report (Three Candles Press First Book Prize winner, reissued by Isobar Press, 2014), and the chapbook A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland (Concrete Wolf, 2006). Her work has been featured in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac, and is forthcoming at Motionpoems. She has received the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Japan. www.jessicagoodfellow.com/

Gloria Frym
gloriafrym

(click photo to hear poem, and interview with Gloria Frym)
Gloria Frym is a poet and fiction writer. Her most recent book is Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX books, 2011) and prior to that she published the chapbook Any Time Soon (Little Red Leaves, 2010). Other works by Frym include The Lost Poems of Sappho (Effing Press, 2007) and Solution Simulacra(United Artists Books, 2006). A previous book of poems, Homeless at Home, won an American Book Award.
She is the author of several other volumes of poetry and two critically acclaimed short story collections: Distance No Object (City Lights Books) and How I Learned (Coffee House Press). She is twice a recipient of The Fund for Poetry Award, the Walter & Elise Haas Creative Work Fund Grant, the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award, and several California Arts Council grants to teach poetry writing to jail inmates.
She has published numerous articles on literature, visual arts, and music. Her research and academic interests include international poetries; 19th century and modernist international fiction; Walt Whitman; Emily Dickinson; the short story; the poem in prose; and ungenrefied writing.

Rex Butters
Rex Butters

(click to hear poem)
Since 1976, longtime SoCal resident Rex Butters has published journalistic writings on sites and in magazines including BAM, Rapport, All About Jazz, Folk Works, the LA Free Press, and the Free Venice Beachhead. His poetry has appeared for over 25 years in such diverse journals as Caffeine, Brain Vomit, interbang, sic Vice and Verse, The Journal of Interdimensional Poetry, Yogi Times, Bad Haircut Quarterly, the Mas Tequila Review, and the Muse International Journal of poetry. His anthology credits include Cost of Freedom, The Revolutionary Poets Brigade, and forthcoming Writer’s Round Talk Show anthology. He writes and performs with the improvised music/funk/spoken word ensembles, Black Shoe Polish, and Rag & Bone, and sings and reads with various projects.

Tiffany Vakilian
Tiffany Monique

(click photo to hear poem)
Tiffany Vakilian has been writing since she was a small child. Her poetry has been published in multiple independent anthologies and journals, as well as www.timobe.com, her blog. Having earned her Masters in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, Tiffany continues her quest to use word-art as a facilitator of social commentary and change. In her first poetry book, Ugly Drawers, Pretty Panties Tiffany shares her verbal vignettes of dreams, experiences, perspectives and people. She s the quintessential Renaissance Gal- a member of ASCAP, The National Forensics League, and Transformative Language Arts Network.