RATTLE #33 - Summer 2010

Rattle presents...

Issue #33 Reading
& Release Party

Sunday
August 15th
2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

The Church in Ocean Park
235 Hill Street
Santa Monica, CA

Rattle #33 featured a tribute to humor, along with interviews with Aram Saroyan and Carl Phillips, and our always-eclectic blend of accessible poetry. Poets from across the country perform their work, including interviewee Aram Saroyan.

Refreshments provided. Admission is free. Donations to the church accepted at the door.

Featured readers include:

Devika Brandt
J. Scott Brownlee
John Harris
Marvin Klotz
Manuel Paul Lopez
Rick Lupert
Aram Saroyan
Steve Westbrook

Devika Brandt lives and writes in Occidental, CA, and also teaches at Greenwood School in Mill Valley. Her work has been published in Rattle, Poetry International, and the South Carolina Review, among others. She was a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize, a semi-finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Pacific University in Forest Grove, OR.

J. Scott Brownlee earned his BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently a library science graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a student of the poets Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar of Raleigh, North Carolina--as well as the managing editor and co-founder of The Raleigh Review. He hopes to attend The Michener Center for Writers next fall--assuming they let him in--and is currently at work on his first book-length manuscript, County Lines, which explores small-town life in the Texas Hill Country.

John Harris is a senior editor at the Getty Museum. His poems have appeared in various journals, including Exquisite Corpse, Bark, Summerset Review, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and, of course, Rattle, and he has written a number of children’s books, most recently, A Giraffe Goes to Paris…. He lives in Santa Monica with his dachshund, Mavis.  

Marvin Klotz taught (mainly at Cal State University, Northridge) for 36 years before retiring, and has co-edited The Experience of Fiction and nine editions of Literature: The Human Experience, a thematic introduction to literature anthology. As well, he authored typical academic stuff on Twain, Crane, Faulkner, E.A. Robinson, Styron, and Albee. Along the way, he taught in London and served as a Fulbright professor in Saigon, Taipei, and Teheran. After retiring from teaching, he became an enrolled agent income tax preparer and published one more essay: Taxation in the Hebrew Bible (California Society of Enrolled Agents Journal). He writes a poem a week at home in Venice (whether he feels like it or not), and spends a good deal of time sitting on a bench, trolling for material, down at the Venice Beach paddle tennis courts. 

Manuel Paul Lopez was born and raised in the U.S.-Mexican border region of El Centro, California, and received degrees from Imperial Valley College, the University of California, San Diego, and San Francisco State University. His work has been published in Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue, ZYZZYVA, Hanging Loose, and Rattle, among others, and anthologized in Roque Dalton Redux (Cedar Hill Publications). Lopez has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the California Writers Exchange Program sponsored by Poets and Writers. He has taught at Imperial Valley College, Southwest High School, and High Tech High. With his wife, he currently lives in San Diego. His first book entitled Death of a Mexican and other Poems was published by Bear Star Press in 2006 and was awarded the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize.

Rick Lupert’s poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Los Angeles Times, Chiron Review, Stirring, PoeticDiversity.org, and Zuzu’s Petals.  He edited A Poet’s Haggadah: Passover through the Eyes of Poets and is the author of 12 books.  He hosts the Cobalt Café reading series and maintains poetrysuperhighway.com.  Rick works as a freelance graphic designer and website person, and as the music teacher at a synagogue in Northridge, CA.

Aram Saroyan’s poetry has been widely anthologized and appears in many textbooks. His Day and Night: Bolinas Poems was published by Black Sparrow Press in January 1999. His Complete Minimal Poems, published in June 2007 by Ugly Duckling Presse, received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Saroyan’s prose books include Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation and Last Rites, a book about the death of his father, the playwright and short story writer William Saroyan. Door to the River: Essays and Reviews from the 1960s into the Digital Age was recently published by Black Sparrow/Godine. For the past fourteen years he has been a faculty member of the Master of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. The father of three adult children, he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter Gailyn Saroyan. 

Steve Westbrook is an associate professor of English at California State University, Fullerton, where he teaches courses in creative writing, composition, and cultural studies. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Conduit, Good Foot, Hibbleton Independent, Lexicon Polaroid, Literal Latte, The Los Angeles Review, and Rattle. He is thrilled to be accompanied at the reading by Sean Lewis, who will be playing the lap-slide guitar.