Yiskah Rosenfeld will read from her new collection Tasting Flight (Madville Publishing), runner up for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize, finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Prize, and a Concrete Wolf Honorable Mention. Joy Ladin writes, “Tasting Flight unflinchingly questions, complicates, and celebrates what it means to be a woman and to be deeply, imperfectly, human.” Chad Sweeney calls it “a Hebraic Sutra where Rosenfeld sits in meditation until she and the garden are one, bread and night are one, sacred and mundane, the cursed and the blessed, until Lilith and Eve complete the circle whose center is everywhere.” Yiskah moved to Berkeley in the 1990s and received her MFA in poetry from Mills College. Awards include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Frontier Poetry Roots and Roads Prize, and a Hippocrates Society of Poetry and Medicine commendation. Poems appear in The Bitter Oleander, Lilith Magazine, The Seattle Review, Rattle, Tikkun Daily, and elsewhere. Her art-themed chapbook, Naked Beside Fish, also came out this year.

 Linda Ravenswood, a Los Angeles performance poet, will read from her 2022 Arthur Smith Prize winning collection a poem is a house (Madville Publishing). Lee Herrick says, “This book is a revelation. Ravenswood shows us that—a poem is a house—as well as a housefire, a history, a family, a stranger, a choir…This is a visionary urgency. I love this book.” Recent collections include Cantadora—letters from California, The Stan Poems, Tlacuilx—Tongues in Quarantine, and Xla Poets. A poet and a performance poet from Los Angeles, she is the founding editor of The Los Angeles Press and the co-founder of the Poet Laureate program in Glendale, California. Her honors include an Oxford Prize in Poetry (2022) and the Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry (2023).