With support from the California Arts Council, we will pay class fees for the Director of Poetry Flash to train in the new website template format with Duende, a Design Company in San Francisco. The Director will learn how to post poetry, editorials, event calendar dates and other content on the website in a four month course. This will reduce our dependence on independent contractors, to replace the former content posting process which has been inefficient and unnecessarily time consuming.
Poetry Flash publishes monthly issues online, with calendar listings of California online literary events, book reviews, interviews, poems, and calls for submission. We also facilitate the Poetry Flash Reading Series, with a new reading nearly every week, held at independent bookstores, galleries, and other venues in the Bay Area and online. Other projects include the annual Northern California Book Awards and the annual Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival which also includes the Strawberry Creek Walk and poetry installation art. Events like these feature numerous poets and writers, both prominent ones and newly emerging voices, from California and beyond. We are also putting out a new high-quality anthology of Berkeley Poetry. Poetry Flash has been assisting and inspiring poets and writers in numerous ways for almost fifty years, we have deep roots in the literary community and are one of the oldest dedicated poetry organizations on the west coast.