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Location: Garden Room, Edgehill Mansion. 75 Magnolia Avenue, San Rafael CA 94901.

Join us for a poetry reading with MFA in Creative Writing faculty Iris Jamahl Dunkle and visiting poets Dana Gioia and Elise Paschen.

Registration is required. This event is free and open to the public as a service to our community. The event is hosted by the MFA in Creative Writing program at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. Â鶹ÊÓƵ is a nonprofit institution.

Contact mfa@dominican.edu with any questions.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an Emerita Poet Laureate of Sonoma County and a faculty member at UC Davis and she teaches in the Â鶹ÊÓƵ University Low-Res MFA program. She has authored two biographies: Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024). Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was recently published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle writes a weekly blog called Finding Lost Voices, which revives the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered and serves as the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. She’s on the board of the National Book Critics Circle where she is the Co-VP of Awards.

Dana Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of California. An internationally recognized poet and critic, he is the author of six collections of verse, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and 99 Poems (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize for the best new poetry volume of the year. His most recent collection is Meet Me at the Lighthouse (2023). His six critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, and Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life (2022). His recent publications include Poetry as Enchantment (2024) and Weep, Shudder, Die (2024), a book on opera and poetry. Gioia has also written six opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies.

Elise Paschen is the author of Blood Wolf Moon, Tallchief, The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities
(winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize), and Houses: Coasts. As an undergraduate at Harvard, she received the Garrison Medal for poetry. She holds M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees from Oxford University. Her poems have been published widely, including Poetry Magazine, The New Yorker, A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry and The Best American Poetry. She has edited or co-edited numerous anthologies, including The New York Times best-seller, Poetry Speaks. A co-founder of Poetry in Motion, Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.