New Works from Barbara Tomash, Joan Baranow, and Christina Lopez

New Works from Barbara Tomash, Joan Baranow, Christina Lopez, and Dominican MFA Writers
* Wednesday, April 26, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Join Barbara Tomash, Joan Baranow, and Christina Lopez reading from their new collections. Dominican MFA students and alums will also share brief excerpts from new works.

Barbara Tomash is the author of four books of poetry, PRE– (Black Radish Books 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), Flying in Water, which won the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award, and The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009). An earlier version of PRE- was a finalist for the Colorado Prize and the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Web Conjunctions, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, Witness, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the creative writing department at San Francisco State University

Joan Baranow founded and teaches in Dominican’s MFA program in creative writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, JAMA, Feminist Studies, Spillway, and other magazines. Her poetry has also appeared in the anthologies that focus on writing and healing: Women Write Their Bodies: Stories of Illness and Recovery (Kent State, 2007) and The Art of Medicine in Metaphors (Copernicus Healthcare, 2012). She has published four books of poetry, most recently In the Next Life (Poetic Matrix Press, 2019).

A Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and long-time member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she has won individual artists fellowships in poetry from the Marin Arts Council and from the Ohio Arts Council. With her husband, physician, and poet David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her second documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a young woman facing terminal illness.

Christina Lopez is a writer who aims for accuracy through brevity. She is a recent alumna of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Dominican University of California, where her craft talk in short fiction and nonfiction inspired the program’s 100 Days of 100-Word Stories challenge.

As the Administrative Assistant for the MFA program, Christina is a point of contact for anyone interested in these kinds of writing challenges, as well as events like this one. She has a background in ecology and natural resource management, and after writing so many 100-word-stories intuitively knows when she’s reached her word count.

This event is being offered as a prologue to the Bay Area Book Festival. For more prologue events or to learn more about the BABF, visit their website here.