April 1 - Laraine Herring

April 8 - John Olivares Espinoza

Photo of Laraine HerringLaraine Herring, MFA, teaches creative writing at Phoenix Community College. She has an MA in Psychology and is training as a poetry therapist. Her first book, Monsoons, was published in 1999. Her novel, Lay My Sorrows Down, won the Barbara Deming Award for Women. She's at work on a new novel, Throwing Bones, a non-fiction book, Missing the Man: Adolescent Father Loss: A Woman's Guide through Grief, and a poetry collection called Breath. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Photo of John Olivares EspinozaJohn Olivares Espinoza was born in 1978 in Indio, Calif., and spent his youth landscaping with his brothers and father, a Mexican immigrant. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Aluminum Times (2002) and Gardeners of Eden, was the recipient of a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, and recently, won El Andar Prize for Literary Excellence. He is a graduate of the University of California, Riverside, and is currently earning his MFA in creative writing at Arizona State University.

April 15 - Virginia Chase Sutton

April 22 - Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Photo of Virginia Chase SuttonBook Launch Celebration - Virginia Chase Sutton was the Louis Untermeyer Scholar in Poetry at Breadloaf and a winner of the Paumanock Visiting Writer Series. She recently won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award and the National Poetry Hunt. Her poetry has appeared in Paris Review, Boulevard, Poughshares, Witness, Antioch, and Western Humanities Review. She has three Pushcart nominations and has been a fellow at Ragdale Foundation many times. Her first book, Embellishments, was published earlier this year.

Photo of Beckian Fritz GoldbergBeckian Fritz Goldberg is the author of Body Betrayer (Cleveland State University Press, 1991), In the Badlands of Desire (Cleveland State University, 1993), and Never Be the Horse, winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize selected by Thomas Lux (University of Akron Press, 1999.) Her newest volume of poems, The Book of Accident, will appear in Spring 2003 from Invisible Cities Press. Currently Goldberg directs the MFA Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.