Keith Holyoak and Koon Woon are our two featured readers this Wednesday June 24 starting at 7 PM. for Virtually Live PoetryBridge #13. Everyone on the mailing list will receive an invitation link Wednesday morning. If you know someone who wants to be on our mailing list, please have them personally contact me directly at info@poetrybridge.net. See Featured Poems to read poems they plan on reading.
Keith Holyoak, raised on a dairy farm in British Columbia, is now a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. In addition to a volume of translations from classical Chinese poetry, Facing the Moon: Poems of Li Bai and Du Fu (Oyster River Press, 2007), he has published four volumes of his own original poetry. The most recent is Oracle Bones: Poems from the Time of Misrule (Goldfish Press, 2019). Keith has been a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He combined his interests in psychology and poetry to write The Spider’s Thread: Metaphor in Mind, Brain, and Poetry (MIT Press, 2019).
Koon Woon is a poet who usually does things out of order. He published two books of poems before he was in a writing program and his early poems are better than his later ones by a long shot. Now he is editor / publisher of Goldfish Press, which is primarily interested in bringing out new talent. His books have won a Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for literary excellence and an American Book Award.
He has been nominated five times for a Pushcart Award and the Best of the Net. His poetry is internationally anthologized, and his books have been used as texts to teach poetry at Sarah Lawrence, Bard, UC Berkeley, among other colleges and universities. However, he is now student again at the University of New Orleans for an MFA. Now at seventy-one years of age, he is finally awakened to the immensity of poetry, both as art and as a healing agent for personal as well as societal ills.