TONIGHT: Poetry Reading Benefit for Autism

Dear friends,

You must check out tonight's reading at the Sacramento Poetry Center--it's a benefit for autism. The reading starts at 7:30 p.m. and features Rebecca Foust, Julie Bruck and Geoffrey Neill. Bios below. This event is free; donations are encouraged and will support the UC Davis MIND Institute to support autism research. Check it out!

Rebecca Foust was born in Altoona, formerly one of the country’s great railroad towns, located in the Allegheny Mountains in western Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Hollidaysburg, a tiny town surrounded by farmlands and forests, quarries and strip mines. After attending Smith College and Stanford Law School on scholarships, she practiced law in San Francisco for ten years, then worked as an advocate and grassroots political organizer for parents of kids with autism and other learning disorders.She continues to do volunteer work for causes related to autism and teach and write in northern California, where I live with my husband and three teenagers. In January of 2010 I will receive my MFA from Warren Wilson College. Her recent poetry is published or forthcoming in small print journals including Atlanta Review, Margie, North American Review, The Hudson Review, and Women’s Review of Books, earning awards including two Pushcart nominations in 2008. Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes, and her full length book, All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award and will be released in 2010. Also to be released in 2010, by Tebot Bach Press, is God, Seed, a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens.

Julie Bruck has taught at several Canadian universities, and was a resident faculty member at The Robert Frost Place. She has an MFA from Warren Wilson, fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and the Canada Council, and has published two collections, The Woman Downstairs (1993) and The End of Travel (1999). A third book is in the works. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Ms. New poems are forthcoming in The New Yorker and The Malahat Review. A Montreal native, she has lived in San Francisco for eleven years.

Geoffrey Neill is one of the alternating hosts at Poetry Unplugged at Luna’s Café in Sacramento. He has lived in California his whole life (thirty-one complete years, one partial year), currently on 2nd Ave in Sacramento. He has a daughter (Muriel, and the pinnacle of evolution) who is nearly two years old, and he recently started publishing chapbooks of local poets under the name /little m press/.