Lory Bedikian to participate in a A Celebration of Feminist Poets Who Span a Generation
A Celebration of Feminist Poets Who Span a Generation
On Saturday, May 7th, Red Hen Press and the Women’s Center of Los Angeles will hold a benefit reading - A Celebration of Feminist Poets Who Span a Generation – From the 1960's to Present Day featuring renown feminist poets Judy Grahn and Eloise Klein Healy in conversation with up-and-coming contemporary feminist poets Lory Bedikian, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Adrienne Christiansen, Nicelle Davis, and Jenny Factor.
The event will begin with a champagne reception at 2 p.m. at the Feminist Majority Foundation/Ms. Magazine (433 S Beverly Dr, Beverly Hills, CA 90212). Tickets are available in advance for $16.00 for adults, $12.00 for students and seniors, and for $25.00 at the door. This benefit is in support Red Hen Press and WCLA - two nonprofit organizations dedicated to the shared values, voices, legacy, and impact of women writers.
Free book, champagne, and hors d'oeuvres included with ticket.
Reader Bios:
Judy Grahn is teacher, activist and award winning author of The Common Woman Poems, Edward the Dyke, A Simple Revolution: the Making of an Activist Poet and many more. Some of her recent publications include Love Belongs to Those Who Do the Feeling and The Judy Grahn Reader. Her forthcoming (and 14th) book is Hanging On Our Own Bones. She was a member of the Gay Women’s Liberation Group, the first lesbian-feminist collective on the West Coast, founded in 1969 which established the first women’s bookstore, A Woman’s Place, as well as the first all-woman press, the Woman’s Press Collective. Ms. Grahn earned her PhD from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her honors include a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an American Book Review Award, an American Book Award, an American Library Award, and a Founding Foremothers of Women’s Spirituality Award. Since 1997 Publishing Triangle, after awarding Grahn a Lifetime Achievement Award in Lesbian Letters, has issued an annual Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award. Today, Ms. Grahn lives in California and teaches women's mythology and ancient literature, Metaformic Consciousness (a philosophy created by Grahn), and Uncommon Kinship - a course that uses theories from her Metaformic philosophy which traces the roots of culture back to ancient menstrual rights at the California Institute for Integral Studies, the New College of California, and the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.
Eloise Klein Healy the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles is professor emerita at Antioch University Los Angeles and the co-founder of Eco-Arts. Her collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the 2003 Lambda Literary Awards in Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award from The. Healy has also received the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and has received six Pushcart nominations. She was involved in the Woman's Building, the well known West Coast feminist cultural center, throughout the 1970s and 1980s in various capacities including as a teacher and a member of the Board of Directors. Healy was instrumental in directing the women's studies program at Cal State Northridge, started the MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University and founded Arktoi Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press.
Lory Bedikian’s The Book of Lamenting was awarded the 2010 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. Bedikian received her BA from UCLA with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Poetry where she was twice nominated for the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. Her poems have been published in the Connecticut Review, Portland Review,Poetry International, Poet Lore and Heliotrope among other journals and have been included in Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets. And, Poets & Writers magazine chose her work as a finalist for the 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. She lives and teaches poetry workshops in Los Angeles.
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is one-sixth of the poetry collective, Line Assembly and in 2014, recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Poetry Fellowship. Her chapbook cutthroat glamours (2013) won the Phantom Press chapbook contest and her first full-length book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2012), was selected by Claudia Rankine as the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award winner and was a 2013 poetry nominee for the Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award for outstanding works of literature published by people of African descent. Her second book, a slice from the cake made of air,was released this spring from Red Hen Press; her third book, personal science, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press.
Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her books poetry includes Becoming Judas, Circe, and In the Circus of You. Her fourth book of poems, The Walled Wife,was released by Red Hen Press this spring. Davis’ work has been published by The Beloit Poetry Journal, The New York Quarterly, PANK, SLAB Magazine, and others. Davis is the editor-at-large of The Los Angeles Review and was the recipient of the 2013 AROHO retreat 9 3/4 Fellowship. She currently teaches at Paraclete and with the Red Hen Press WITS program.
Jenny Factor earned a BA in anthropology at Harvard University, where she studied with Seamus Heaney, and an MFA in literature and poetry at Bennington College. Her book the Unraveling at the Name won the 2002 Hayden Carruth Award and her poems have been featured in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Erotic Poems, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, and The Poet’s Child. Factor lives in San Marino, California and has worked as a freelance writer, editor and taught at Antioch University, Los Angeles.
