Recorded live at the WordTemple Poetry Series in Sebastopol, three poets celebrate new collections — Sandra Angfang, Lee Slonimsky and Katherine Hastings. Introduced by Sonoma County Poet Laureate Iris Jamahl Dunkle.

Opening Poet Sandra Anfang is a prize-winning teacher, poet and visual artist. Her most recent collection is a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Looking Glass Heart. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Poetalk; West Trestle Review; and Spillway, among others. Sandra is a California Poet/Teacher in the schools and the founder and host of the monthly poetry series, Rivertown Poets, in Petaluma, CA.

Lee Slonimsky’s new collection is Consulting With the Swifts — New and Selected Poems, 1982 — 2016. Many Sonoma County residents have been treated to his previous collections, including Pythagoras in Love (now translated into a French edition by Elizabeth Coleman); Talk Between Leaf and Skin; Money and Light; Red-Tailed Hawk on Wall Street; Logician of the Wind and Wandering Electron. Lee is also the author of a mystery, Bermuda Gold.

Visiting from New York’s Hudson Valley, Slonimsky is co-author with his wife, Carol Goodman, of an urban fantasy trilogy starting with the riveting Black Swan Rising. His poems have appeared in numerous places, including The New York Times; Best of Asheville Poetry Review and The Carolina Quarterly, and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize seven times. When he’s not walking and writing poems in the process, Slonimsky is the manager of a hedge fund, Ocean Partners, LP, and of its humane/vegan side pocket, Green Hills Partners LP.

“The best poems here, and they are many, all reclaim a moment from the clamor of the world; and each such poem in turn presents the attentive reader with a like moment of refuge…Like Monet with his haystacks or cathedrals, Slonimsky achieves repetition and variation without monotony…The poems invite us to focus, to traingulate, to seek out correspondences. Writing these poems helped Slonimsky to do these things; reading them helps us.” — Rachel Hadas

Sonoma County poet laureate emerita, radio host of WordTemple on NPR affiliate KRCB FM, and founder and host of the WordTemple Poetry Series, Katherine Hastings celebrates her third collection of poetry, Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar (Spuyten Duyvil, NYC, August 2016). Previous books include Cloud Fire; and Nighthawks.

Shakespeare and Stein Walk into a Bar is animated by the two most rewarding and replenishing of poetic forces: dexterous formal diversity and a fierce, unflinching searching. “Where to go from here?” the book begins, lifting us through “the world we’ve left to ourselves” and singing us at last to the still point where “We, too, dissolve” with “all of it finding its way — somewhere.” Shakespeare and Stein Walk into a Bar is more than a collection of poems; it is a quest fulfilled by destination. —Malachi Black, author of Storm Towards Morning.