Sri Lankan American poet Indran Amirthanayagam is visiting the Bay Area with his new book SEER. Amirthanayagam will read with amazing Californian poets and friends: William Daly, Heather Bourbeau and Karen Poppy. Together we will hear four visions, four poetries, four affirmations of life before the four horsemen riding in America today.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes poems in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole. He has published 25 books. He publishes poetry at Beltway Editions(www.beltwayeditions.com). He edits Beltway Poetry, a digital poetry magazine. He hosts The Poetry Channel on youtube. His new books are Seer (Hanging Loose Press, 2024) and The Runner’s Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). Amirthanayagam’s translation of Mexican poet Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes is forthcoming from Dialogos Books.
William O’Daly has translated nine books of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda’s poetry, including Neruda’s first volume, Book of Twilight. In September 2022, Beltway Editions released his most recent book of poems, The New Gods. The Los Angeles Master Chorale included poems from The New Gods and the chapbook Waterways in the world premiere of Reena Esmail’s “Malhaar: A Requiem for Water,” at Walt Disney Concert Hall. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, O’Daly has received national and regional honors for his poetry and translations and served on the national board of Poets Against War. He also has served as Lead Writer for the California Water Plan, a strategic plan for sustainably and equitably managing water resources.
Heather Bourbeau’s award-winning poetry and fiction have appeared in The Irish Times, The Kenyon Review, Meridian, and The Stockholm Review of Literature. Her writings are part of the Special Collections at the James Joyce Library, University College Dublin and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. She has worked with various UN agencies, including the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia and UNICEF Somalia. Her collection Some Days The Bird is a poetry conversation with the Irish-Australian poet Anne Casey (Beltway Editions, 2022). Her latest poetry collection, Monarch, examines overlooked histories from the US West (Cornerstone Press, 2023).
A non-binary poet, Karen Poppy’s debut full-length collection, Diving at the Lip of the Water, is published by Beltway Editions (2023), and is lauded by the legendary Judy Grahn for its demonstration of "paradox and power." She has two chapbooks published with Finishing Line Press, and another chapbook published with Homestead Lighthouse Press: Crack Open/Emergency, our own beautiful brutality, and Every Possible Thing. An attorney licensed in California and Texas, and a librettist, Karen Poppy lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.