Writers' Series

The English department supports the LTCC Writers’ Series. We bring well-known poets and writers from all over the country to the college for readings, book signings, craft talks, and workshops. All events are free and open to the public.

We have hosted writers such as Luis Rodriguez, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Holly Payne, Kevin Clark, Gailmarie Pahmeier, Sholeh Wolpé, David Daniel, H.L. Hix, Francisco Jimenez, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Chris Abani.  We also sponsor faculty readings, poetry open mic nights, and the annual Kokanee Literary Journal award reading.

For information about our Writers' Series, contact Suzanne Roberts at (530) 541-4660 ext. 708.

Upcoming Events

National Poetry Month with Three Award-Winning Poets

The Lake Tahoe Community College Writers’ Series will proudly celebrate National Poetry Month on Friday, April 12 at 7:00 p.m. in the LTCC Library. Three award-winning poets—Kelle Groom, Lexa Hillyer, and Krista Lukas—will read from their works, engage the audience with a Q and A, and sign books. The event is free and open to the community. Books will be available for purchase.

Kelle Groom’s memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (Simon & Schuster), is a B&N Discover Great New Writers pick, NYTBR Editor's Choice, a Library Journal Best Memoir, and Oprah O Magazine selection. Her most recent poetry collection is Five Kingdoms. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and The New Yorker. She is currently serving as the Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village, Nevada.

Lexa Hillyer is the recipient of the second annual Bona Fide Books Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize for her book Acquainted with the Cold. She was the recipient of the Inaugural Poetry Prize from Tusculum Review and the First Prize in Poetry from Brick & Mortar Review, and was named one of the Best New Poets of 2012. She worked as an editor at both Harper Collins and Penguin, and is co-founder of boutique literary incubator Paper Lantern Lit. She lives in Brooklyn.

Krista Lukas is the author of a poetry collection, Fans of My Unconscious, (Black Rock Press, March 2013). Her poems appear in literary journals including 5AM and Rattle, in the textbook Creative Writer’s Handbook, and in the anthologies New Poets of the American West and The Best American Poetry 2006.

The LTCC Writers’ Series is committed to providing a cultural outlet for its students and the community by offering free readings, discussions, craft talks, and workshops with nationally-known award-winning authors, as well as poetry slams, open mic nights, and student readings. Over the past 12 years, LTCC has hosted poets and writers such as Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, Denise Duhamel, Luis Rodriguez, H.L. Hix, Sholeh Wolpé, Chris Abani, Dorianne Laux, Francisco Jimenez, Juan Felipe Herrera, and Lama Marut.

Previous Engagements include:

Tracy Ross

Tracy Ross is an award-winning journalist and contributing editor at Backpacker Magazine. Her essay “The Source of All Things” won the National Magazine Award in 2009 and has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Magazine Writing. Her Skiing magazine story “Our Country Comes Skiing in Peace” received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing, and her work has also appeared in Outside and Women’s Sports Illustrated. Ross’s assignments have taken her to the wilds of Alaska, the ski slopes of Iran, and the most remote reaches of Ecuador. She writes about exotic places and intriguing people, but mainly about the wilderness and how it intersects with the most important issues in our lives. O Magazine has called her memoir The Source of All Things “Disturbing but beautifully written...[And we’ve] heard stories like these before, but rarely in such clear, unsentimental prose.” Tracy Ross currently lives with her family at 8,000 feet in the mountains above Boulder, Colorado.

Get Out of My Crotch!

Twenty-One Writers Respond to America’s War on Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health, published on January 22, 2012 by Cherry Bomb Books (an imprint of local Meyers press Bona Fide Books) to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

In this anthology, twenty-one fearless writers examine reproductive rights, access to health care, violence against women, and the rise of rape apologists in the twenty-first-century United States. Illuminating intersections of gender, class, and race, these stories speak to the challenges women routinely face, the attempts to undermine their rights, and the deliberate, systemic erosion of their agency and existence as equals. Contributors include award-winning authors as Roxanne Gay, Rebecca K. O’Connor, Kevin Sampsell, Kate Sheppard, and Lidia Yuknavitch, and many others.

 

Poetry Slam with emcee Denise Jolly

 

Jeremy Evans first book,

“In Search of Powder,” follows an eight-year newspaper career that garnered numerous awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and Nevada Press Association. Evans' work has appeared in regional and national magazines, including Skiing and Powder. Evans lives in South Lake Tahoe where he is working on his next book.

Scott Lankford got lost on his way to Stanford University and spent the next 10 years as a combination Tahoe ski-bum and graduate student -- eventually earning his Ph.D. in modern thought and literature with a dissertation on John Muir. Currently, a professor of English at Foothill College in the Bay Area, he is a co-founder of the new Foothill Center for a Sustainable Future. A self-declared "Tahologist," his book “Tahoe beneath the Surface” was recently awarded a national Bronze Medal as "Nature Book of the Year 2010" by Foreword Reviews.

Author Scott Lankford

Poet Jason Schossler, author of "Mud Cakes"

"Mud Cakes" is a deep and heartfelt examination of growing up in Middle America at a time when spiritual guidance comes from Luke Skywalker and KISS. Pop culture has replaced religion for a young boy in Ohio, and this collection of poems shows us how he uses modern mythologies to navigate the deterioration of his family. Poet Jason Schossler conjures images of childhood that evoke both the resilience of youth and its vulnerabilities.

Jennifer Woodlief, author of "A Wall of White"

Jennifer Woodlief has worked as a reporter for Sports Illustrated as well as an assistant district attorney and a CIA case officer with a top-secret clearance. Her first book, "Ski to Die: The Bill Johnson Story," was published in 2005 and optioned by Warner Bros. for a movie. Her most recent book about the Alpine Meadows avalanche, "A Wall of White: The True Story of Heroism and Survival in the Face of a Deadly Avalanche," was published in February of 2009 by Atria. She splits her time between Truckee and Tiburon, California.

 

Nathalie Handal, poet, playwright, and writer

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and writer. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. She is the author of the poetry collections, The NeverField and The Lives of Rain (short-listed for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize/The Pitt Poetry Series and recipient of the Menada Award); the poetry CDs Traveling Rooms and Spell; the editor of The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (an Academy of American Poets Bestseller and winner of the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles Award); and co-editor along with Tina Chang and Ravi Shankar of Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). She has been involved either as a writer, director or producer in over twenty theatrical and/or film productions worldwide. She was a finalist for the 2009 A Room of Her Own's Freedom Award, and her forthcoming poetry book, Love and Strange Horses, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Poet June Saraceno and Fiction Writer Christopher Coake

June Sylvester Saraceno is originally from Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Her chapbook Mean Girl Trips was published fall 2006 by Pudding House Press. Her first full length collection of poetry, Altars of Ordinary Light, was released by Plain View Press in 2007. She is currently English Program Chair at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe and founding editor of the Sierra Nevada College Review.

Christopher Coake’s short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Epoch, and Five Points, and has been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2004. His first book, a collection of short stories titled We're in Trouble, was released in 2005 by Harcourt. He is currently working on a novel that examines a century in the history of a gold mining town in Colorado.

 

Jan Beatty

Jan Beatty is the author of three books: Red Sugar (2008), Boneshaker (2002), and Mad River (winner, 1994 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her limited edition chapbook, Ravenous, won the 1995 State Street prize. For the past 15 years, Beatty has hosted and produced Prosody, a public radio show on NPR affiliate WYEP-FM featuring the work of national writers.

Beatty has worked as a welfare caseworker and an abortion counselor. She worked in maximum-security prisons and was a waitress for 15 years. She directs the creative writing program at Carlow University where she teaches the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops and in the MFA program.

Patricia Smith

Lauded by critics as “a testament to the power of words to change lives,” Patricia Smith is the author of five acclaimed poetry volumes—Blood Dazzler, which chronicles the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina; Teahouse of the Almighty (a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the first-ever Hurston/Wright Award in Poetry); Close to Death, Life According to Motown; and Big Towns, Big Talk.

Among her many honors are a Pushcart Prize and the Carl Sandburg Award.

Brian Turner, author of "Here, Bullet," the award-winning book about serving in Iraq.

Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, "Here, Bullet," won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the New York Times “Editor's Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA "Best in the West" award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others.

Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Turner's poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad in South Korea.

"Here, Bullet" is a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq war. The poems in this remarkable collection reflect Turner's experiences as a soldier with penetrating lyric power, compassion, sensitivity, and eloquence, while deploring the violence and acknowledging the grief and terror of war. One poem, "Eulogy," was written to memorialize a soldier in his platoon who took his own life. Adding his voice to the current debate about the US occupation of Iraq, in poems written in the tradition of such poets as Wilfred Owen, Yusef Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau), Bruce Weigl (Song of Napalm) and Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire), veteran Brian Turner's affecting poetry of witness is exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. These gracefully-rendered, unflinching poems make "Here, Bullet" a must-read for anyone who cares about the war, regardless of political affiliation.

An Evening with Publisher and Writer Kate Gale

Kate Gale is the founding editor of Red Hen Press, and the author of five books of poetry, most recently Mating Season (Tupelo Press). She has also written one children's book, a novel, and the libretto to the opera Rio de Sangre. Kate received her doctorate in English literature from Claremont Graduate University in English literature and teaches at California State University Dominguez. She lives and writes in Los Angeles, California.

Todd James Pierce

Pierce was winner of the 2006 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his book, "Newsworld" (2006), which was selected by Joan Didion. He is also the author of the novel, "The Australia Stories" (2003), which was later republished under the title "A Woman of Stone" (2006), and a textbook on writing called "Behind the Short Story" (2007).

 

Bart Edelman

Edelman is a professor of English at Glendale College where he edits Eclipse, a literary journal. His work has appeared in many anthologies and textbooks. He teaches workshops across the United States and was Poet-in-Residence at Monroe College of the State University of New York. His poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack (1993), Under Damaris’ Dress (1996), The Alphabet of Love (1999), The Gentle Man (2001) and The Last Mojito (2005).

 

 

Poet Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry. Her most recent titles are Two and Two (University of Pittsburgh, 2005) and Mille et un sentiments (Firewheel Editions, 2005). Her other books currently in print are Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner, winner of the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize (1999); Kinky (1997); Girl Soldier (1996); and How the Sky Fell (1996). A winner of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she has been anthologized widely, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry (2000, 1998, 1994, and 1993). Duhamel teaches creative writing and literature at Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, FL, with her husband, the poet Nick Carbó.

Nevada Writer Ann Ronald

A foundation professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Ronald was named the university’s outstanding researcher in 2005. In 2006, she was elected to the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Best known for her book on Edward Abbey, The New West of Edward Abbey, she also has written a Zane Grey monograph and a study of nineteen-century British fiction, Functions of Setting in the Novel.

Francisco Jimenez

At the age of 4, Francisco Jiminez and his family crawled under a fence crossing the border between Mexico and America. Working from sunrise to sunset, the entire family made only $15 a day as migrant farmworkers, living in one room shacks and tents without electricity or running water. As a result of his family's illiteracy, persistent poverty, and transient lifestyle, Professor Jimenez's education was sporadic at best. In his early years, he largely educated himself, reading books he found at the local dump.

Today, Professor Francisco Jiminez is a professor of Modern Languages at Santa Clara University, an acclaimed author, and the winner of numerous awards. At the global level, Professor Jiminez creates awareness about the plight of migrant farmworkers - his award-winning books, which include the autobiographical novels "The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child," and its sequel, "Breaking Through," have been published in English, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.