Promoting Irish-American Culture
and Preserving Local Histories
Through Year-Round Programs

The 2015 Irish-American Crossroads Festival

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Tuesday, March 10

A Poetry Reading with Irish-American Bay Area Poets Judy Wells & Kathleen McClung

Tuesday, March 10, 7 pm Location:  BookShop West Portal, 80 West Portal Avenue, San Francisco, California Free. Donations welcome.

photoIcon See a wonderful series of photographs taken during this event at our Facebook page. Thanks to everyone who joined us there.

Bay Area poets, Judy Wells and Kathleen McClung, were featured readers at our annual Irish-American Crossroads poetry reading. A special thanks to our partnering sponsor, BookShop West Portal.

Judy Wells is a celebrated Bay Area poet who, in her most recent collection, The Glass Ship, presents prose poems narrating an episodic journey based on ancient Irish mythical voyages. She has published ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including I Have Berkeley, Albuquerque Winter; Jane, Jane; The Part-Time Teacher; The Calling: Twentieth Century Women Artists; Everything Irish; Call Home; Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh; I Dream of Circus Characters:  A Berkeley Chronicle, and her most recent, The Glass Ship. She was a featured reader in the Berkeley Poetry Festival, 2006, 2009, and 2011 and she is also co-editor of The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon (McFarland, 2005).

Judy was an academic counselor and faculty member at Saint Mary’s College of California, working with adults returning to school.  Judy was born in San Francisco and raised in Martinez, California.  She received her B.A. from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Now a full-time poet, she lives with her husband, avant-garde poet Dale Jensen, in Berkeley, California.

Kathleen McClung is the author of Almost the Rowboat (Finishing Line Press, 2013) and her poems appear or are forthcoming in Mezzo Cammin, Unsplendid, Atlanta Review, Ekphrasis, Poets 11, Sin Fronteras, A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, and elsewhere. A Pushcart Prize nominee, in 2014 she won prizes in contests sponsored by the Bay Area Poets Coalition, Illinois State Poetry Society, Green River Writers in Kentucky, and Great River Shakespeare Festival in Minnesota. She has been an invited featured reader at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, Tennessee, the Hygienic Gallery in New London, Connecticut, and many Bay Area libraries and bookstores.

Kathleen serves as sponsor-judge of the sonnet category of the Soul-Making Keats literary competition and as reviewer for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, sponsored by the Stanford University Libraries. She teaches writing and literature classes at Skyline College and the Writing Salon and coordinates Women on Writing (WOW) community events. Kathleen holds masters degrees in Education and English from Stanford University and California State University Fresno. She has lived in San Francisco for over twenty years.

Refreshments served courtesy of Kerrygold and John Campbell’s Irish Bakery, 5625 Geary Blvd., San Francisco, CA 94121.

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