February 20, 2020 | Poetry Café Bellas Artes

February Poetry Café Features Diverse, Award-Winning Poets

By Catherine Marenghi

Three poets reflecting exciting and diverse voices and boasting a range of accolades will read at the Poetry Café Bellas Artes on February 20, 5:00 PM.

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a former teacher at Oakland School for the Arts, the former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and a June Jordan Poetry for the People alum at UC Berkeley. Currently living in Mexico as a dual citizen, he writes a monthly column, “Pocho Boy Meets World,” which explores literary voices throughout Latin America. His work has recently been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bold Italic, and Alien Magazine. Find him on Twitter @alan_chazaro.

Kathryn Jordan is a writer, musician, and teacher from Berkeley, California, who confesses to being vocationally promiscuous. After studying for her MA with former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, she taught English, music, and guitar for 25 years. In addition to leading youth choirs and teaching K-3 vocal music, she devised and taught a middle-school curriculum combining music theory, creative writing, singing, and history to teach African-American music and its impact on American life. Kathryn is the 2016 winner of the San Miguel Writers’ Conference Poetry Prize, and her poems are published in The Comstock Review, The New Ohio Review, Reed Magazine, Birdland, and Panoplyzine, among others. Her book is Riding Waves (Finishing Line Press) and her new manuscript is a finalist for the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Contest. She is also a finalist for the 2020 Tucson Festival of the Book Literary Prize. She loves hiking the East Bay Hills, turning bird song to poetry whenever possible.

Beth Spencer won first place in a fifth-grade writing contest with a poem called Why I Like to Read Good Books. Her prize was an atlas showing a world that has much changed since then. Encouraged by that early success, she has pursued writing fiction and poetry, and her works have been published in journals and anthologies including Wisconsin Review, FoxCry, Lakesider, and Wind magazines. She also won first prize in a poetry contest honoring poet Dorothy Dalton Kuehn. Currently residing near Minneapolis, she was an elementary teacher and counselor in Neenah, Wisconsin, for 27 years. Her first book, C- in Conduct, is available on Amazon. Her second book, What the Autopsy Discovered, awaits a publisher.

Founded in January 2016, Poetry Café Bellas Artes typically meets the third Thursday of the month, September through April. The all-volunteer organization presents local and visiting poets, both established and emerging, sharing their work in a casual setting.

Please arrive a few minutes early. Seating is limited.