Wednesday: at Casa Romantica

The 2009 reading series at San Clemente's Casa Romantica begins tomorrow evening with poets Stephanie Brown and Colette Labouff Atkinson. Casa Romantica is located at 415 Avenida Granada in San Clemente. For more information: (949) 498-2139 As always, the event starts at 7 PM and is free and open to the public.

from their website:

Stephanie Brown was born in 1961 in Pasadena, California and grew up in Newport Beach. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Iowa, and Boston University. She is the author of Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1998) and Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). She received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. Among other publications, she has published over forty poems in American Poetry Review since 1988, appeared on the March/April 2005 and July/August 1996 issue covers, and won the magazine's Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Award in 1994. Her poems were selected for four editions of the The Best American Poetry (Scribner’s). Her poetry and essays have been included in many recent anthologies such as Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner’s, 2003) and The Grand Permission: Essays on Poetry and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). She has made her living as a public librarian since 1989 and is currently a Senior Branch Manager for the Orange County Public Library system. She has taught creative writing at the University of California, Irvine and at the University of Redlands. She is married and the mother of two sons, and lives in San Clemente.

Colette Labouff Atkinson's prose has appeared in the following: Orange Coast Magazine, Seneca Review, River Teeth, Santa Monica Review, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Babble, and elsewhere. She is the author of Mean, a collection of prose poems (University of Chicago Press). She has recently taught in the literary journalism program at UC Irvine and last spring taught poetry workshops at Pitzer College. She is Associate Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at UC Irvine, and she lives in Southern California.