With the support of the California Arts Council, The John Oliver Simon Legacy Poetry Project brings poetry workshops to 7 East Bay schools. Five Teaching Artists will work with teachers, 12 sessions, grades 2-12, September 2020 to June 2021. At residency’s end, students will review and edit poems for publication in anthologies, for school events, and the Poetry Flash Watershed Festival.
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.