DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts another installment of Poetry Flash on Sunday, June 12th at 3pm. The featured guest poets will be Susan Cohen and Catherine Abbey Hodges. 

Poetry Flash readings are wheelchair accessible; ASL interpreters may be requested one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org. Visit Poetryflash.org for more events and reviews! Poetry Flash has begun a Kickstarter campaign. Click here to learn more about helping them so they can better serve and support the literary communities of the West Coast and beyond. 

Join us for the official book launch of Susan Cohen’s second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, winner of the 2015 Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. Stephen Dunn says, “Her descriptions constitute what I want to call intelligence—someone in the act of getting the world right, making it ours as well as hers.” A former contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she was also a professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and anthologized in the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry.

Catherine Abbey Hodges’s debut book of poems is Instead of Sadness, winner of the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Paulann Petersen says, “Catherine Abbey Hodges offers us—inside each musical line, within each vibrant trope—a luminous wisdom. Each poem gives us a world ‘replenished like a well // in blues and greens and wings.’” She is also author of the chapbook All the While, and she is professor of English at Porterville College in Central California.

Copies of each book will be available for purchase at the event.