giovanni singleton, Kathleen Winter, and David Beckman

giovanni singleton is a poet, teacher, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. A recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award Show for Literature, she frequently presents on writing and other subjects at schools and conferences. She has been a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Cave Canem and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Tonight she will read from new new book, Ascension (Counterpath, 2012). From Counterpath Press: “These poems press against our deepest held questions: What is an I? Where are my borders? What or how am I ‘with’? From whom — from what — do we hide?”

Kathleen Winter first read for WordTemple during the first season of the series — way back when. We welcome her back now to celebrate the publication of her new book Nostalgia For the Criminal Past, winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. Winter grew up in San Antonio, Texas and lives in Northern California. Her poems have appeared in journals such as AGNI, FIELD, The New Republic, Anti- and the Cincinnati Review. She holds degrees from Arizona State University, the University of California, Davis, School of Law, Boston College and the University of Texas at Austin. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco.

David Beckman’s chapbook, Language Factory of the Mind, was published by Finishing Line Press in December 2011. His poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in The Marin Poetry Anthology, The Green Door, Audience, and Spillway. He is a 2012 nominee for a Pushcart Poetry Prize. David’s plays have been produced at The Beast Festival in New York, Powerhouse Theater in Santa Monica, 6th Street Playhouse in Santa Rosa, and at Pegasus Theater’s Tapas Short Play Festivals in Monte Rio. One of his short play scripts is in the coming issue of In Posse Review. His novel Under Pegasus was published in 1996 and he has a short story in the current issue of Shaking magazine.