The Spring 2015 Living Writers Series is focused on flexible forms and mixed media. You can expect writers and artists working in and across a number of forms, and through a variety of media to include poetry, fiction, film, graphic art, dance, and music. Each of the writers and artists featured in this series combines multiple genres and materials, whether textual, sonic, visual, and/or embodied to explore intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and class in their written, screened, and staged performances.

The Living Writers Series is a free and public event held Thursdays, 6:00-7:45 pm in Humanities Lecture Hall 206. For more information, please email rvwilson@ucsc.edu

Eleni Sikelianos

believes in redistributing wealth (top to bottom) and in the overturning of Citizens United. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently The Loving Detail of the Living & the Dead (Coffee House, 2013), and two hybrid memoirs (The Book of Jon, City Lights, and You Animal Machine, Coffee House). Sikelianos has been the happy recipient of various awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, including two National Endowment for the Arts Awards, a NYFA, NYSCA, and the National Poetry Series. Her work has been translated into over a dozen languages, and is widely anthologized. She has taught poetry in public schools, homeless shelters, and prisons, and collaborated with musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists. She is on guest faculty for the Naropa Summer Writing Program, and for L’Ecole de Littérature in France and Morocco; she teaches at the University of Denver, where she runs the Writers in the Schools program. She can be found online at: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/eleni-sik%C3%A9lian%C3%B2s

Josef Sikelianos

is a songwriter and musician living in Berkeley CA. He heads the indie folk band Baby Teeth, who are releasing their first full length album this spring. After exploring many disciplines with some thoroughness, Sikelianos graduated cum laude from San Francisco State University with a degree in fine art. Sikelianos put himself through school doing tree work and is now also the owner of a professional tree service company, The Urban Arborist, working in the San Francisco Bay area. Sikelianos notes that “the greatest luxury is the exploration of aesthetics without premeditation or agenda, and the appreciation of beauty is in every endeavor I undertake.” In his spare time Sikelianos reads his sister’s books. He can be found online at: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/josef-sikelianos/2b/427/545

Spring 2015 Living Writer Series:
April 16: Janice Lee
April 23: Terri Witek, Jai Arun Ravine
April 30: Marilyn Chin
May 7: Jared Harvey, Gabriela Ramirez-Chavez, Whitney De Vos, Nicholas James Whittington, Eric Sneathen
May 14: Dawn Lundy Martin
May 21: Eleni Sikelianos, Josef Sikelianos
May 28: Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson
June 4: Student Reading
June 11: Senior Projects Reading