MEDIA ADVISORY
A live poetic broadcast one day, a literary ballgame the next
Cal State L.A. poetry series to feature modern American poet Sesshu Foster
“Recent Rupture Radio Hour”
Tuesday, Feb. 24 – 6 p.m.
Music Hall, on the Cal State L.A. campus
“World Ball Notebook”
Wednesday, Feb. 25 – 6 p.m.
Music Hall, on the Cal State L.A. campus
Los Angeles, CA -- Sesshu Foster, an award-winning contemporary poet and author who grew up in the City Terrace community of Los Angeles, will pay an extended visit to Cal State L.A.
As part of the CSULA Poetry Series, Foster will co-host a multimedia performance, ”Recent Rupture Radio Hour,” on Tuesday, Feb. 24, and present a reading and booksigning of his recently published book, “World Ball Notebook,” on Wednesday, Feb. 25. Both events will be held at 6 p.m. in the Music Hall of the CSULA campus.
In addition to participating in the University’s creative writing and English classes, Foster will visit Chester W. Nimitz Middle School in Huntington Park and Schurr High School in Montebello.
Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 20 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is MP3-archived at www.salon.com and his local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website www.ELAguide.org.
Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual (Kaya/Muae), published in 1996, marked the debut of a striking new voice experimenting with the prose poem genre. His next book, the novel Atomic Aztex (City Lights, 2005) was awarded The Believer Magazine’s Annual Book Award (2006), and received critical acclaim from publications, such as Publishers Weekly, Bookforum, The Village Voice, Los Angeles Times’ Book Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He was co-editor with Naomi Quinonez and Michelle Clinton of Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry, which won the American Book Award.
Foster’s visit is supported by the CSULA Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, the Department of English at Cal State L.A., and the National Endowment for the Arts. For more details, call the CSULA English Department at (323) 343-4140 or go to www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/nfoster.php.
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