EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS is excited to welcome back our friends from Poetry Flash on Sunday, March 15th at 3pm. This month we will be joined by Judy Halebsky & Susan Briante.

Judy Halebsky’s new book of poems is Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged), was a finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize. Katy Peterson says, “Under the spell of Bashõ’s haiku, but written in a voice entirely its own, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) is the first book of poetry I’ve read in years that makes civilization look good. It makes me want to make dinner, make love, make noise.” She’s the author of three previous collections, the first of which, Sky = Empty, won the New Issues Poetry Prize. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, she moved to the Bay Area to study poetry. Then, after college, she received a fellowship from the Japanese Ministry of Culture to study Japanese literature at Hosei University in Tokyo, She lives now with her family in Oakland and directs the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University.

Susan Briante’s latest book of poems is The Market Wonders. Juliana Spahr said of it, “Poetry’s conventions tend to assume that poetry does not need to bother itself with the economic machinations of something like the Dow. These conventions are wrong and Susan Briante’s The Market Wonders proves it. This is poetry that is only the richer for how it weaves the economics that shape our daily lives into it.” She’s published two previous collections, Pioneers in the Study of Motion and Utopia Minus. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arizona and coordinates the writing program Field Studies Southwest, which brings MFA students to the U.S.-Mexico border to work with community-based environmental and social justice groups. She hosts the radio program Speedway and Swan and lives in Tucson, Arizona.