Casa Romantica: Wednesday evening

Casa Romantica presents writers Wang Ping and Daniel Tiffany at their end-of-the-month free reading series.

From their website:
Wang Ping was born in Shanghai and grew up on a small island in the East China Sea. After three years of farming in a mountain village, she attended Beijing University. In 1985 she left China to study in the U.S., earning her Ph.D. from New York University. Her books include two collections of poetry, The Magic Whip and Of Flesh & Spirit, the cultural study Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China, the novel Foreign Devil, two collections of fiction stories entitled American Visa and The Last Communist Virgin, and a book of Chinese folk lore, The Dragon Emperor. Her books have been translated into German (Foreign Devil) and Dutch and Japanese (American Visa). Wang is also the editor and co-translator of the anthology New Generation: Poetry from China Today and co-translator of Flames by Xue Di.

Her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 1993 and 1996. She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft Career Initiative, and Bush Foundation, and she was a recipient of the Lannan Residency Program in 2007. She now lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and teaches creative writing at Macalester College. Her current research is on China's globalization and modernization, and she debuted in 2007 as a photographer and filmmaker with an exhibit on the impact of the Three Gorges Dam, entitled Behind the Gate.

Daniel Tiffany's first book of poetry, Puppet Wardrobe, appeared in 2006 from Parlor Press. He has published translations of works by Sophocles, Georges Bataille, and the Italian poet, Cesare Pavese. His critical works include Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (University of California Press, 2000), named one of the "Best Books of 2000" by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. His poetry, which has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in many journals, including Tin House, Boston Review, Volt, The Germ, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and the Paris Review. He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Karolyi Foundation in France and been the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship. His most recent poetry project, "The Dandelion Clock," was set to music by the composer Daniel Rothman and installed at the Interface New Music Festival in Berlin in 2007. He lives in Venice, California and teaches at the University of Southern California.

Casa Romantica is lcoated at 415 Avenida Granada in San Clemente. Readings begin at 7 pm.