I am excited to start off the New Year with two very interesting featured readers. Judith Camann had read frequently at Community Mic and this will be her first time reading as a featured reader. Thomas Hubbard has just completed a long trek from Arkansas to Seattle and was recommended by Koon Woon. I am looking forward to hearing both of them read plus our amazing community Micers.
Judith Camann is an MFA candidate at Ashland University in Ashland Ohio. She has just completed her thesis semester and flew to Ohio for the last time this summer to defend it before a panel of poets. Here in Seattle she has co-founded 2 writing groups, Parents Are Writer’s Too and Overcoming Oranges. Her poetry has been featured by Eyedrum Periodically, Main Street Rag, Weasel Press, and The Wild Word among other places.
She has been an educator with Seattle Public Schools since 2001 teaching from kindergarten through the age of 21, including poetry, language arts, social skills, and career development. She currently supports young adults here in West Seattle at South Seattle Community College and The Georgetown Campus. She holds undergraduate degrees in Early Childhood Education, Special Education & Elementary Education as well as an M.Ed. in counseling.
One of her poetry instructors said of her, "She has an ability to create word portraits of people too seldom acknowledged in mainstream culture (I began to call her "the Diane Arbus of poetry)"
After co-editing an underground newspaper in the midwest during the late sixties, Thomas Hubbard raised a family and worked at various endeavors. He is currently a retired writing instructor and freelance feature writer who became active in Seattle's Slam and other venues in 1993, winning Seattle's Grand Slam in 1995.
He has been published in various poetry anthologies and literary journals, including Red Ink, Yellow Medicine Review, Footsteps, and others. His first chapbook, Nail and other hardworking poems, was published in 1995 by Year of the Dragon Press. He has since published Children Remember Their Fathers, an anthology of mostly performance poets from across the country, followed by Junkyard Dogs, and Injunz.
His most recent collection is Poems for our Peoples, published by Foothills Press. His book reviews have appeared in Square Lake, New Pages, Cartier Street Review and Raven Chronicles, a Pacific Northwest journal for literature and the arts, which has also published several of his essays and articles. The current issue of Raven includes his poem, “The Real Uncle Sam,” and a review of Lenora Good’s historic novel about a tribal woman, Madam Dorion, Her Journey to the Oregon Country.
He runs gazoobi tales publishing, a very small imprint currently offering work by John Kulm, M. Anne Sweet, Dave Caserio, Tiffany Midge, Mary Elizabeth Crane, Margaret Lemberg and Sheryl Sirotnik. He has served on the board of Washington Poetry Association.
