MEDIA ADVISORY
A live poetic broadcast
one day,
a literary ballgame the
next
Cal State L.A. poetry
series to feature
“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.
# # #
Working for California since 1947: The 175-acre hilltop campus of California State University, Los Angeles is at the heart of a major metropolitan city, just five miles from Los Angeles’ civic and cultural center. More than 20,000 students and 205,000 alumni—with a wide variety of interests, ages and backgrounds—reflect the city’s dynamic mix of populations. Six colleges offer nationally recognized science, arts, business, criminal justice, engineering, nursing, education and humanities programs, among others, led by an award-winning faculty. Cal State L.A. is home to the critically-acclaimed Luckman Jazz Orchestra and to a unique university center for gifted students as young as 12.
Programs that provide exciting enrichment opportunities to students and community include an NEH- and Rockefeller-supported humanities center; a NASA-funded center for space research; and a growing forensic science program, housed in the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center. www.calstatela.edu
modern American poet Sesshu Foster
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