5:15-6:15pm Docents available to discuss the site
6:30-8pm Reading

NB: This event begins our switch to Mondays for the fall/spring (with exceptions).

Four Red Hen authors write about love, loss and childhood, but also delve into falling sperm counts, balancing checkbooks and Ed Sullivan – the many trivial things that in aggregate might just convey a deeper meaning.

Jessy Randall’s collection of poems A Day in Boyland was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her other books include a young adult novel, The Wandora Unit, and a collection of collaborative poems, Interruptions, written with Daniel M. Shapiro. Randall’s poems have been hung from trees, made into rock songs by garage bands, used in library advertisements, and sold in gumball machines. Her writing has appeared in Asimov’s, Flurb, Many Mountains Moving, McSweeney’s, Mudfish, Opium, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, and Brain, Child. Randall writes regularly for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly. She spent her childhood in and around Rochester, New York, and now lives in Colorado Springs with her husband and two children. Her newest collection of poetry, Injecting Dreams into Cows, will be released by Red Hen Press in September 2012.

Charles Harper Webb’s numerous books of poetry include Reading the Water, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, Amplified Dog, and Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology, which he edited. Shadow Ball: New & Selected Poems is his most recent collection, from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Among Webb’s awards are the Morse Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollock Prize, the Benjamin Saltman Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poets of the New Century, and Best American Poetry. A former rock singer/guitarist, he is a licensed psychotherapist, and directs the MFA Program at California State University, Long Beach.

Kelly Barth was a fiction fellow in the University of Montana’s creative writing program and has received fellowships from the Missouri Arts Council and the Kansas Arts Commission. Her work has been published in anthologies and literary journals, most recently Coal City Review and Muse & Stone. She lives in a very small house with her partner Lisa Grossman in Lawrence, Kansas. Her first book, My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus, will be released by Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, in September 2012.

Eloise Klein Healy is the author of six books of poetry, most recently, The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho (Red Hen Press, 2007). She has been awarded artist residencies at The MacDowell Colony and Dorland Mountain Colony. She directed the Women’s Studies Program at CSU Northridge and was founding chair of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Her imprint with Red Hen Press, Arktoi Books, specializes in publishing the work of lesbian authors. She is currently at work on a new book, to be released by Red Hen in 2013.

Moderator Kate Gale is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA. She teaches in Low Residency MFA programs across the country and serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of
America. Gale is the author of five books of poetry and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which premiered in October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. Her current projects include a creative non-fiction book Flight of the Ugly Duckling, a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto with composer Daniel Felsenfeld, based on T.C. Boyle’s The Inner Circle.

About Red Hen Press
Now a national presence in independent publishing, Red Hen Press was founded in 1994 by Mark E. Cull and Kate Gale. As a nonprofit literary press that publishes twenty works of poetry, literary fiction, and autobiography each year, they are dedicated to supporting quality writing that is being ignored or overlooked by large or commercial publishers. The Press also donates books to schools, libraries and other institutions, and presents seven reading series in New York and Los Angeles showcasing current and backlist authors. The Red Hen Press is a place for writers’ work to be published and celebrated; a literary family for a diversity of voices that articulate the variety of human experience.

For more information regarding this event, please email publicity@redhen.org and visit Red Hen Press.

Stop by early for information on the Beach House by docents from the Santa Monica Conservancy before every Beach=Culture evening, from 5:15-6:15pm.

Tickets are free but space is limited and reservations are required. If you would like to attend, please reserve online. Please plan to arrive by 6:15pm to retain your reservation. Late seating, even for reservation-holders, is not guaranteed. To adjust or cancel your reservation for this event, email beachhouse@smgov.net. We appreciate your keeping in touch!

Directions: The Beach House is located at 415 Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica, CA 90402 on the west side of Pacific Coast Highway, a half mile north of the California Incline and a half mile south of Chautauqua Blvd. Plenty of public parking is available - enter off PCH at the Beach House Way traffic light. The facility is easily accessible by foot or bike from the beach bike path, although the Beach closes at sunset. There is ample bike parking at racks throughout the site - remember to bring your own lock.

Parking: For weekday Beach=Culture events May-September, there is a daily $8 parking charge at the park and pay machines available in three areas of the ACBH parking lot. For hourly and weekend fees, please check the website for details.

Other events: To view & make reservations for future free Beach=Culture events, check http://annenbergbeachhouse.com/beachculture.

General Info: For hours, events and more, visit http://www.annenbergbeachhouse.com, or call 310-458-4904. Back on the Beach Café hours are subject to change depending on weather - call ahead.