Chaucer’s Books Poetry Month Celebration

                                                                                                                          Poetry Night Event

      SANTA BARBARA, CA.-To celebrate National Poetry Month, Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street) will host six published local poets for reading on Monday, April 24 at 6 p.m.    Hosted by Santa Barbara Youth Poet Laureate Madeline C. Miller,  the participants are Avrom Altman, M.L. Brown, Christopher Buckley, Emily Lord-Kambitsch, Christine Penko, and Daniel Thomas.

 Poet Biographies

 Avrom Altman began studying Zen Buddhism in 1967 and sat zazen with Shunryū Suzuki Roshi at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in 1969. In 1989, he became a semazen of the Mevlevi Sufi order under the guidance of Sheik Suleiman Dede and sheik Jelaleddin Loras. Avrom has taught over 150 seminars and retreats based on the Gurdjieff Work and is on the Gurdjieff Heritage Society Board of Directors.

Avrom is Professor Emeritus at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He received the Distinguished Service Award in 2009 and the Award for Extraordinary Accomplishments as Soul Tender in the World in 2015. Avrom is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and certified Hakomi Therapist, and has been in private practice for over 40 years.

Flowers of Emptiness: Imaginal Haiku is Avrom’s first published collection of haiku.

M. L. Brown is the author of Call It Mist, winner of the Three Mile Harbor Press Book Prize, and Drought, winner of the Claudia Emerson Chapbook Award.

She will read from Blue Will Rise Over Yellow: An International Poetry Anthology for Ukraine, edited by John Bradley. Proceeds from sales of the anthology go to support Ukrainian refugees displace by the Russian invasion.

Christopher Buckley is the editor of NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays, Stephen F. Austin State Univ. Press, 2021.  He has published 27 books of poetry and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright award, and 2 NEA grants in poetry. His most recent book is One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press Book Prize, in 2023.

The poems are modest, straightforward, intensely lyrical, and totally accessible. . . .  This is humble poetry of great truths and profound emotions that never overstates its concern for the events both in and above the world.

  —Philip Levine:  U.S. Poet Laureate

Emily Lord-Kambitsch – is a poet-storyteller, mythologist, and yogi. Her poetry and short fiction is published in The Dawntreader, Burn Before Reading, and Espacio Fronterizo • Espace Frontière • Borderland. She teaches courses in Greco-Roman myth, ritual studies, memoir and autobiography, dissertation writing, and theoretical approaches to comparative mythology in the Mythological Studies Program at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, California.

Christine Penko writes poetry, memoir, and book reviews. Her poetry and reviews appear, most recently, in the journal SALT and in the international poetry anthology for Ukraine, And Blue Will Rise Over Yellow. For twenty years, Christine was a poet-in-residence with California Poets in the Schools.

Daniel Thomas Drawing from Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn is a poetry collection that explores how a long relationship of love is like a spiritual practice, a challenge to live in true care and compassion with those to whom we are closest.

Daniel Thomas’s first collection, Deep Pockets, won a 2018 Catholic Press Award. He has published poems in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, Poetry Ireland Review, Atlanta Review, and others.