Writing On Demand Hosted By Mende Smith

Join Mende as she talks to Larry Colker Larry Colker has co-hosted, with Jim Doane, the weekly Redondo Poets at Coffee Cartel reading in Redondo Beach (www.redondopoets.com) for the last 12 years. His poems have appeared in The Sun, The Los Angeles Review, RATTLE, Brickbat Revue, Spillway, ONTHEBUS, Solo, Pearl, Cider Press Review, Burnside Review, Blue Satellite and elsewhere in print; online at The Cortland Review, King Log, nthposition, Poeticdiversity and Poetry Super Highway; and in anthologies from Tebot Bach, Valley Contemporary Poets, Arroyo Arts Collective, Poeticdiversity, and The Little Joy Open Mic. Chapbooks include "At the Curb, Car Waiting, Boy Standing" (1995), "What the Lizard Knows: New and Selected Poems" (2003), "Hunger Crossing," with Danielle Grilli (2006), and "Girl with Tattooed Heart, Boy Standing" (2009). Tebot Bach is currently considering a book-length collection for publication. In 2005 his poem "The Caterpillars" was nominated by Poeticdiversity.com for a Pushcart Prize. In 2006 he was selected by Charles Harper Webb as the poetry winner of the California Writers Exchange contest sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc. Larry spent his formative years in Huntington, WV, before attending Deerfield Academy, the University of Chicago (BA, Humanities; MA, Romance Languages and Literatures), the University of Missouri at Kansas City (MA, Educational Research and Psychology), and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (Ph.D., Early Childhood Education). For a dozen years he worked in education, first as a French teacher, then Montessori teacher, then assistant professor at USC. He switched to freelance technical writing for corporate software publishers and corporate IT departments about 25 years ago. For the last six years he has been working as a contract instructional designer and trainer for Kaiser Permanente. He lives in San Pedro. Larry has a daughter and two grandchildren.