Meeting the third Sunday of the month at 2pm, The Davis Arts Center Poetry Series typically features two readers. Admission is free but donations are always appreciated and all proceeds benefit Davis Arts Center! The Series is hosted by James Lee Jobe. Thanks to everyone that attended our first reading (audio archive here).
The May 20th reading will feature Traci Gourdine and William O’Daly.
Traci Gourdine is a professor of English at American River College and chairs the creative writing department for the California State Summer School for the Arts. She chaired the Sacramento Poet Laureate Committee for four laureate terms.
For 10 years, she facilitated writing workshops in several California state prisons. Ringing in the Wild (2015) is her debut full-length poetry collection, published by Ad Lumen Press.
Gourdine’s poetry and stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she has been anthologized in Shepard and Thomas’ Sudden Fiction Continued. Gourdine and Quincy Troupe were paired in a yearlong exchange of letters for the anthology Letters to Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008).
She is co-editor of Night is Gone, Day is Still Coming an anthology of writing by young native writers, as well as We Beg to Differ, poems by Sacramento poets against the Iraq war. She also has co-edited the Tule Review with Luke Breit for the Sacramento Poetry Center.
William O’Daly has translated eight books of the late-career and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, and most recently a ninth — the young Neruda’s first volume of poems, Book of Twilight — all published by Copper Canyon Press. O’Daly’s chapbooks of poems include The Whale in the Web, published by Copper Canyon, as well as The Road to Isla Negra (2015) and Water Ways (2017, a collaboration with JS Graustein), both published by Folded Word Press. Yarrow and Smoke, another chapbook of poems, is Folded Word’s 2018 Masters Series selection and will be released in May. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry and was profiled by Mike Leonard for The Today Show. He has received national and regional honors for literary editing and instructional design, was a national board member of Poets Against War, and is a co-founder of Copper Canyon Press. Most recently he was recognized by the State of California for his work on the California Water Plan.