Featured Poets
Ann Buxie, Malibu Poet Laureate 2021-2023, has a PhD in Mythology with an emphasis in Depth Psychology. The origin of a word and the historical development of its meaning inform how she loves practicing the arts of a good conversation, loves thinking together, and loves exploring all kinds of communities. A desert transplant, having been raised in Yuma, Arizona, she has been inventing new ways to put words together to imagine a landscape and its people in a mosaic of natural strength and purpose. In the Vibrant Cycles Poetry Studio, she will stir us to explore our roots, stems, and blooms—and the vibrant cycles that influence our lives.
Dana Gioia is a poet and critic and former Poet Laureate of California. He is the author of six collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which received the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize. His seven critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, and Poetry as Enchantment (2024). He has written six opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies. Gioia served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, where he created the largest programs in the agency’s history, including Poetry Out Loud and the Big Read. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.
Peg Quinn grew up in rural Nebraska. She has a B.F.A. in Education from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and four times nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut poetry collection, Mother Lode, was published by Gunpowder Press in 2021. Now she is introducing her chapbook manuscript to us about how her beloved Kenny, who had Down syndrome, enlightened her childhood: To Any Gods Still Watching. An educator, visual artist, and certified beekeeper, she lives in Santa Barbara, California.
Enid Osborn served as Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA in 2017-2019. Her book When the Big Wind Comes (Big Yes Press, 2015) takes place during her childhood in Southeast New Mexico. Her work appears frequently in CA regional and Southwest journals and anthologies. “The Place of Loss” was nominated by Askew for a Pushcart Prize. She co-edited A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens, (Green Poet Press, 2011). Active on the West Coast as a featured poet, guest teacher, poetry judge, and coordinator of Zoom poetry events, she also writes songs, short stories, and reviews—and paints. Her new collection is scheduled for release in late 2025 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions: Pedregosa St. Photograph: Phil Taggart
Ricardo Means Ybarra, the first Poet Laureate of Malibu, 2017-2019, is author of eight books: The Pink Rosary (1993), Brotherhood of Dolphins (1997), Framing Job (1997), Scratch and the Pirates of Paradise Cove (2008), Scratch and the Space Invaders (2014), Beyond the Reef (2015), A Framing Job (2017), and Radical Beauty (2019). For eight years, he and Jolynn Regan have led poetry writing workshops in the Malibu schools. Quilt (2025) features poetry and art from fifth-grade students at Malibu Elementary School. On the last Tuesday evening of every month, Means also hosts an online poetry “howl.”
Marsha de la O earned her MFA from Vermont College. She is the author of two collections of poetry: Black Hope (1997), winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize, and Antidote for Night (2015), winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize from BOA Editions. De La O is associated with landscapes and cityscapes of Southern California, and her poetry is known for its nuanced observation and description of the region. A former bilingual schoolteacher, de la O now lives in Ventura, California. The recipient of the 2014 Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, the dA Poetry Prize, and the Ventura Poetry Prize, with her husband Phil Taggart, she publishes the poetry journal Askew.
Phil Taggart has four collections of poetry: Walking the Dog in a Time of Rage, Rick Sings, Opium Wars and an art book with artist Ann Harithas, Cowboy Collages. He has been a poetry editor for over twenty years for Art Life limited edition, and with Marsha de la O, the Askew Poetry Journal and Spillway. He has taught poetry workshops at Cal Lutheran, University of Pittsburg, local high schools, CAPS Media, and elementary schools. He teaches Broadcast Digital Media at El Camino High School at Ventura College. Phil has run and supported poetry readings in Ventura County and Santa Barbara since 1991. He presently hosts a weekly poetry reading at the EP Foster Library in Ventura. Photograph: Alexis Rhone Fancher
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet born in California and author of Wildness Before Something Sublime (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Levis Reading Prize, the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry, and longlisted for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award. Her honors include multiple Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and Cleveland State University. Her poems appear in The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, POETRY, and elsewhere. She teaches in Pacific University’s M.F.A. program and lives in Cincinnati.
Tim Seibles is the author of several books of poetry including Hurdy-Gurdy and Buffalo Head Solos, published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. His fifth collection, Fast Animal, published by Etruscan Press, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award and winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. In 2017, his book One Turn Around The Sun was released. As the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018, Seibles traveled the state as an ambassador for poetry. At Old Dominion University for 24 years, he taught a variety of literature classes and several courses for the MFA in Writing program. A collection of his new and selected poems, Voodoo Libretto was released by Etruscan in 2022. His newest book will be released in early 2026: With No Hat.
Lynne Thompson, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Emerita and a lawyer, is the author of four poetry collections, Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2015); Fretwork, winner of the 2019 Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize; and Blue on a Blue Palette, BOA Editions, April 2024. A recipient of the George Drury Smith Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry and the Steven Dunn Poetry Prize, she serves on the Boards of the Poetry Foundation and The Los Angeles Review of Books and is the current President of Cave Canem. Thompson’s recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2020, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and Gulf Coast, as well as the anthology Dear Yusef: Essays, Letters, and Poems For and About One Mr. Komunyakaa.
Carol V. Davis is the author of four books of poetry in English, most recently Below Zero and Because I Cannot Leave This Body. A fifth book, in English/Russian was also published. Her poetry has been read on National Public Radio, the Library of Congress, and Radio Russia. Twice a Fulbright scholar in Russia, she also taught in Siberia and teaches at Santa Monica College, California, and Antioch University Los Angeles. She also teaches literature and Creative Writing in SMC’s Emeritus Program. She was awarded a Fulbright Specialist grant for Siberia in 2020, postponed because of Covid and now cancelled. Donna Sternberg and Dancers is using Davis’s poetry in the recent dance piece “Ancestors’ Voices.”
Elizabeth Iannaci is a partially sighted SoCal-based poet who earned her MFA in Poetry from VCFA. Widely published, her latest chapbook is The Virgin Turtle Light Show (Latitude 34 Press). Recently, her work appeared Gunpowder Press’s Anthology Women in a Golden State, Midwestern Miscellany, Interlitq, etc. She’s read at countless venues in the U.S. and Europe, has one son, three grandchildren, two grand pups, and prefers paisley to polka dots.
Suzanne Lummis is the editor of Beyond Baroque Books’ imprint, the Pacific Coast Poetry Series, and the editor of the just-released anthology, Poetry Goes to the Movies. Her fourth poetry collection, Crime Wave, will be published this fall by the edgier end of What Books imprint Giant Claw. Individual poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Plume, Ploughshares, The New Yorker, the current Poetry Salzburg, forthcoming in Rattle. With the endowment as a 2018/19 COLA (City of Los Angeles) fellow, she launched an ambitious series of seventy-two 280 space utterances, Tweets from Hell.
Leslie Monsour, born in Los Angeles and raised in Mexico City, Chicago, and Panama, is the author of Before the Forest Burns (June of 2025), The Alarming Beauty of the Sky, The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Rhina P. Espaillat, and several chapbooks, including The House Sitter, winner of the 2010 Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition. Her poems, essays, and translations appear in Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, The Dark Horse, First Things, Galway Review, Literary Matters, Light, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mezzo Cammin, and Poetry, and numerous anthologies including California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present to Outer Space: 100 Poems. The recipient of five Pushcart Prize nominations and an NEA Fellowship, Leslie Monsour now serves as Poet Laureate of Laurel Canyon.
Anita Pulier, after years of practicing law in NY and NJ, traded legal writing for poetry. Her husband Myron and she split their time between NYC and LA. Myron (a retired psychiatrist) has designed all the fabulous covers for her books and chapbooks. Her newest books are Paradise Reexamined and Leaving Brooklyn (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared both online and in print in many journals and anthologies, and she has been the featured poet on The Writers Almanac and Cultural Daily.
Hilda Weiss is the co-founder and curator for www.Poetry.LA, a website that features videos of poets and poetry venues in Southern California. She has poems published and forthcoming in Rattle, Tinderbox, Bicoastal Review, Cultural Daily, Poet Lore, Salamander, Spillway, and Cider Press Review as well as in anthologies Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles, Coiled Serpent, Women in a Golden State, and Poetry Goes to the Movies. In 2023 her manuscript, Seemingly Normal, was a finalist in the National Federation of State Poetry Societies competition. Born in California in 1948, she lives in Santa Monica, where she grows her own vegetables in a garden full of native California plants.
Florence Weinberger has authored six published collections of poetry, the most recent, These Days of Simple Mooring: New and Selected Poems, winner of the Bluelight Press Book Award. Along with six nominations for a Pushcart Prize and a nomination for Best of the Net, her poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Spillway, Comstock Review, Rockvale Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Rattle, Baltimore Review, Calyx, The River Styx, North American Review, and Shenandoah and many anthologies.
Gail Wronsky, recipient of an Artists Fellowship from the California Arts Council, is the author of eight books of poetry, three coauthored collections of experimental poetry, and two books of translations of the poetry of Argentinean poet Alicia Partnoy. Newest titles include Mockingbird’s Proverbs; Born in a Barn on Venus, with artwork by renowned artist Gronk; Some Disenfranchised Evening, winner of the Swan Scythe Chapbook Prize, and Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems.
Lee Herrick, California Poet Laureate, is the author of four books of poems: In Praise of Late Wonder: New and Selected Poems (Gunpowder Press, September 2024); Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020) and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. His poems appear in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy.
Mary Ann McFadden, Ventura Poet Laureate, is an award-winning author of two books of poetry, Eye of the Blackbird and Devil, Dear, who pursued a life in poetry in New York City. For over twelve years she studied, wrote, taught, published books, heard her work set to music performed at Carnegie Hall in New York, won a writing fellowship to New Hampshire’s prestigious MacDowell Colony in 2010, and became a full-fledged poet and teacher. She taught at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and has given workshops at The New York City Libraries and at the Biblioteca in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She now lives on a citrus ranch near Fillmore.
Charlotte Ward, Malibu Poet Laureate with degrees in English, Secondary Education, and Liberal Studies, also holds these professional credentials: administrator for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; Master Practitioner of Ericksonian Hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programing; seminar leader for Photo Reading, the Whole Mind Process; Yoga teacher; and Life Coach with Success Unlimited Network®, which focuses on maximizing declared life purpose. She composes poetry and writes and edits non-fiction books. She hosts a dedicated writing group and participates in Santa Monica College Emeritus classes and area poetry events. Charlotte continues to study how attention to vibrant cycles can bring us meaning and joy.