This Wednesday Eve: Casa Romantica

What better way to spend a warm June evening than to drive to the coast, to San Clemente and listen to fine writers read their work?

Join Casa Romantica as they welcome Marilyn Chin and J. Mark Smith tomorrow evening at 7 PM. Casa Romantica is located at 415 Avenida Granada
in San Clemente. As usual, the event is free and open to the public.


Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (W.W. Norton & Co., 2002), The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty (1994), and Dwarf Bamboo (1987). Chin has won numerous awards for her poetry, including ones from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received a Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, the Paterson Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, as well as residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Residency, and the Djerassi Foundation. Her work has been featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of l996. In addition to writing poetry, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. Presently, she is writing a book of poetic tales. She co-directs the MFA program at San Diego State University.

J. Mark Smith was born in Eugene, Oregon in 1965, and moved with his family to western Canada when he was ten months old. He has published one book of poems — Notes for a Rescue Narrative (Oolichan, 2007). His essays have appeared in the Santa Monica Review. He teaches in the English department at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta.