Join us for an entrancing afternoon with two esteemed poets, Donna Emerson and Gerald Fleming, with selected readings from their recent poetry collections, respectively, Daphne Lifts Up and The Bastard & The Bishop. Our audience will be swept away by musical interludes on various stringed instruments from award-winning composer and musician, Jared Emerson-Johnson. Local watercolor artist and college instructor, Barbara Marlin, creator of the Daphne Lifts Up book cover will display the original artwork and selected prints of other work at the event.
Following the readings and music, a Q&A will follow, with book sales and signing in the lobby. Refreshments will be available for sale.
This is free event, all donations always gratefully accepted.
Donna Emerson divides her time between Petaluma, California, and her family homestead near Ithaca, New York. Retired from teaching at Santa Rosa Jr. College and her clinical social work practice, her recent poetry publications include La Pressa, The Paterson Literary Review, and Weber: The Contemporary West. Her chapbooks: This Water, 2007, Body Rhymes, 2009, Wild Mercy, 2011, and Following Hay, 2013. Her poetry books are The Place of Our Meeting (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Beside the Well (Cherry Grove Collections. 2019). And now, Daphne Lifts Up (Finishing Line Press, 2025).
Donna has received two nominations for the Pushcart Prize, one for "Best of the Net," two nominations for the California Book Award (Body Rhymes, 2009, The Place of Our Meeting, 2018), five awards from the annual Allen Ginsberg Contests, and numerous regional awards for her poetry, creative non-fiction, and prose. Many of her poems appear in journals or anthologies with her black and white or color photography. Anais Nin used Donna's portraits of Anais in her late diaries and press coverage in the New York Times.
Donna has taught poetry to elementary school children and made it part of her community college classrooms (1990-2015). She worked as a volunteer with Alzheimer’s patients at a residential facility to help them create individual and group poems and served as Board member and Events Chair for the Marin Poetry Center (2012-2014).
Donna’s latest book, “Daphne Lifts Up” includes poems about nature around us, nature within us, and relationships with many different people, from family to counseling clients, to students, colleagues at work, animals, birds, and strangers. It addresses birth, illness, death, and resiliency in all these verses.
Gerald Fleming is the author of the poetry collections The Bastard and the Bishop (Hanging Loose Press, 2021), One (Hanging Loose, 2016), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose, 2011), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers, 2005). His work has appeared in many magazines over the decades, including New Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Hanging Loose, Carolina Quarterly, New World Writing, Volt, Paris Lit Up, and Versal.
Fleming edited the print magazines Barnabe Mountain Review and Forward to Velma, the vitreous magazine One (More) Glass, and The Collected Poetry & Prose of Lawrence Fixel (Sixteen Rivers, 2021). He has written numerous books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2005), and lives most of the year near San Francisco, part of the year in Paris.
Fleming, a master of the prose poem, is never satisfied to sing the same song, and this adventuresome spirit pays dividends in these new prose poems. Constantly surprising and inventive, The Bastard and the Bishop offers stories within stories that effortlessly merge the personal and the archetypal, breathing new life into a genre that has increasingly, and often sadly, become predictable.
Jared Emerson-Johnson is a video game music composer, sound designer, voice director and voice actor. He is the Music Supervisor and lead composer at Bay Area Sound, an audio production company specializing in sound design, music and voiceover for video games.