Listen & Be Heard Network  

If you would like to be featured for a future Listen & Be Heard event pleasesign the Open Mic List at Listen & Be Heard Poetry Cafe. Our features for the first two rounds on the 26th: 

Dana Teen Lomax is the author of Curren¢y (Palm Press), Room (a+bend press), and the co-editor of Letters To Poets: Conversations About Poetics, Politics, and Community (Saturnalia Books, 2008). She is working on Q, a series of home movies about raising a daughter on prison grounds, and on a book of poems with the working title Shhh! Lullabies for a Tired Nation.

Bill Vartnaw was born and raised in Petaluma. He moved to San Francisco and established Taurean Horn Press the following year, 1974. To date, Taurean Horn Press has published fourteen books, including his own In Concern: for Angels (1984). THP published 13 issues of OR magazine from various Bay Area Open Readings & 2 issues from Folsom Prison Poetry Workshop, 1976, before he collapsed. Bill received M.A. in Poetics from New College of California, 1991. His work has appeared in various literary magazines over the last 35 years. Co-edited with Geri Digiorno, Petaluma Poetry Walk Anthology/Ten Year Anthology in 2007. Suburbs of My Childhood is expected to come out in 2008 (Beatitude Press).

Olivia Johnson is an inspiring single mother who resides in Oakland California. Her life experiences from childhood to adulthood have strengthened her spirit to never give up even though life dealt her a bad hand. She hopes that her personal thoughts and poems can help those with similar experiences strive to be successful even though they feel forgotten. Her advice is simple: Rise to the top and strengthen your individual spirit. Take the negative examples, and use them as tools to build a palace of success that will shine from the mountaintops. Life isn’t always kind and sometimes it takes a harsh tone from within to move us into the right direction in life. Thanks, Olivia.

Gerald Schwartz, who has studied with Irish-American poet John Montague,as well as with Joseph Brodsky has worked in collaboration with the performance ensemble Solomons Ramada,( now Faking Trains) as well as with The Maud Baum Dance Company, drummer/percussionist Mike Lopez and sound-designer/guitarist Damian Catera. Work out or forthcoming in Northeast Corridor, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry Salzburg (AUS), The Skald Review(Wales), FLIM and POTEPOETZINE (on the Web). In 2001 he represented the Adirondacks by climbing Mt. Marcy and reading his poem Rondeau as part of the Poetry On The Peaks program for the United Nation's International Year of the Mountain. His multimedia work, consTELLations, was performed in Chicago 2006 at the International Conference on the Inpiration of Astronomical Phenomena as part of the Adler Planetarium's 75th Anniversary. He also reviews for RAINTAXI, Web Del Sol and Jacket on the Web. His ONLY OTHERS ARE: Poems was released in 2003 by LEGIBLE PRESS (NYC). WORLD was released as a chapbook by Furniture Press in 2004, (Baltimore). He has work included in Under The Rock Umbrella: Contemporary American Poets 1951-1977 (Mercer University Press, fall, 2006). Book of Tells will be released as a chapbook from Finishing Line Press in the fall of 2007.