The Broad Stage Announces Poetry Red Hen Press Hour Guests, April 25

The Broad Stage at Home is a destination offering new, live-streamed content from artistic partners and archival footage, highlighted by new, recurring series and content broadcast live. This Saturday, April 25 at 8:00 p.m. The Broad Stage at Home presents readings and conversation on the Red Hen Press Poetry Hour, hosted by author Sandra Tsing Loh.

This week's poets include:

• Ellen Bass - her newest collection, Indigo, was published in April 2020 Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals.
• Dexter L. Booth, author of Scratching the Ghost, which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson.
• Keith Flynn - his latest book Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession is a collaboration with photographer Charter Weeks. From 1984-1999, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band, The Crystal Zoo.
• sam sax, queer, Jewish poet & educator, is the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion.

At livestream time, the broadcast is found on The Broad Stage Facebook page www.facebook.com/thebroadstage or website at www.thebroadstage.org/athome. If you are watching on Facebook, please scroll down the page until you see a section called Posts. Feel free to message us on Facebook as well if you have any trouble finding it! We will be standing by to help.

Each program is archived following the live stream for on-demand viewing.

More about the poets

Ellen Bass's newest collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the NEA, the California Arts Council, three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, The Larry Levis Prize and the New Letters Prize. She coedited the first major anthology of women's poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. www.EllenBass.com

Dexter L. Booth is the author of Scratching the Ghost (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the 2012 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was selected by Major Jackson. Booth's poems have been included in the anthologies The Best American Poetry 2015 (edited by Sherman Alexie), The Burden of Light: Poems on Illness and Loss, and The Golden Shovel Anthology honoring Gwendolyn Brooks. Booth was a finalist for the 2016-2017 COG Poetry Award. He was awarded an artist residency at Yaddo in 2017 and another at The MacDowell Colony in 2018. Booth is currently a contributing editor for Waxwing Journal, a PhD. candidate and Provost Fellow at the University of Southern California, and a professor in the Ashland University MFA program. His second collection, Abracadabra, Sunshine is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2021.

Keith Flynn (www.keithflynn.net) is the award-winning author of seven books, including five collections of poetry: The Talking Drum (1991), The Book of Monsters (1994), The Lost Sea (2000), The Golden Ratio (Iris Press, 2007), Colony Collapse Disorder (Wings Press, 2013), and a collection of essays, entitled The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz and Memory: How To Make Your Poetry Swing (Writer's Digest Books, 2007). His latest book is a collaboration with photographer Charter Weeks, entitled Prosperity Gospel: Portraits of the Great Recession. From 1984-1999, he was lyricist and lead singer for the nationally acclaimed rock band, The Crystal Zoo, which produced three albums: Swimming Through Lake Eerie (1992), Pouch (1996), and the spoken-word and music compilation, Nervous Splendor(2003). He is currently touring with a supporting combo, The Holy Men, whose album, LIVE at Diana Wortham Theatre, was released in 2011. His award-winning poetry and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies around the world, including The American Literary Review, The Colorado Review, Poetry Wales, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Five Points, Poetry East, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Margie, The Cimarron Review, Rattle, Shenandoah, Word and Witness: 100 Years of NC Poetry, Crazyhorse, and many others. He has been awarded the Sandburg Prize for poetry, a 2013 NC Literary Fellowship, the ASCAP Emerging Songwriter Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award and was twice named the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for NC. Flynn is founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which began publishing in 1994.

sam sax is a queer, jewish, poet, & educator. He's the author of Madness (Penguin, 2017) winner of The National Poetry Series and Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, & the MacDowell Colony. He's the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion, author of four chapbooks & winner of the Gulf Coast Prize, The Iowa Review Award, & American Literary Award. His poems have appeared in BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The Nation, Poetry Magazine + other journals. He's the poetry editor at BOAAT Press and will be a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University this Fall.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage at the Santa Monica College Performing Arts Center opened its doors in September 2008. The Broad Stage is an artist's dream and an audience's delight. Unlike any performance space in the country, it is sublimely intimate with just over 500 seats and strikingly grand at the same time-allowing eye contact with artists from the boxes to the back row-forging a new kind of artist and audience experience in Los Angeles. Boasting one of the city's largest proscenium stages, The Broad Stage offers theatre, dance, film, opera, jazz, world music, musicals, symphony and chamber orchestras, family programming, and more. Each genre features superlative talent from every generation and around the globe.

No other performing arts center west of the 405 can boast such consistently stellar lineups of performers, including Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Joshua Bell, Michael Fabiano, Sir James Galway, Jonas Kaufman, Anna Netrebko, Garrick Ohlsson, André Watts, Joey Alexander, The Stanley Clarke Band, Dave Grusin, Bobby McFerrin, Brad Mehldau, Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Joshua Redman, Lee Ritenour, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Helen Hunt, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Sutton Foster, Patti LuPone, Matthew Morrison, Chita Rivera, Isabella Rossellini, Alash (Tuvan Throat Singers), Basiani (State Ensemble of Georgian Folk Singing), Josh Groban, Aaron Neville, Pussy Riot, Kyle Abraham Abraham.in.motion, Ballet Hispanico, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Lil Buck, Bedlam Theatre Company, Manual Cinema, 7 Fingers, the Nat Geo Live presentations, and a series in conjunction with Sotheby's that included a talk with Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Ed Moses, and Ed Ruscha.

Red Hen Press, one of the few literary presses in the Los Angeles area, was founded in 1994 by Kate Gale and Mark E. Cull with the intention of keeping creative literature alive. Our focus as a literary press is to publish poetry, literary fiction, and nonfiction. Red Hen Press is committed to publishing work of literary excellence, supporting diversity, and promoting literacy in our local schools. We seek a community of readers and writers who are actively engaged in the essential human practice known as literature.

Red Hen Press offers several literary awards each year, including the Benjamin Saltman Award. The winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award receives a cash prize in addition to publication of the winning poetry collection. Past judges include: Claudia Rankine, Robin Becker, Wanda Coleman, B.H. Fairchild, Nick Flynn, Eloise Klein Healy, David St. John, Dorianne Laux, Thomas Lux, Philip Levine, Alicia Ostriker, James Ragan, Peggy Shumaker, and Quincy Troupe. Other awards offered include the Red Hen Press Short Fiction Award, Women's Prose Prize, Quill (Queer) Prose Award, Nonfiction Award, and Novella Award. Red Hen Press is also committed to promoting literacy in the community. Beyond developing an appreciation of literature, we believe it is essential to our society to promote a readership that remains open and critically engaged in reading a variety of well-written, thought-provoking work. Our Writing in the Schools program brings writers into schools to run writing workshops and to read and discuss their work-promoting both literacy and creative expression among young people. We organize readings in schools, universities, libraries, and literary organizations. We donate books to a variety of organizations, including schools and facilities that educate at-risk youth.