Sesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East L.A. and writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts,  and UC Santa Cruz. He has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. His works, Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook won a 2006 Believer Magazine Annual Book Prize and the 2010 American Book Award.

Rob Wilson has published poems in various journals from Tinfish, Taxi, Manoa, and Central Park, to The New Republic, Ploughshares, Partisan Review and Poetry, and in a book called Waking In Seoul.  His study Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2009.  A new work Beat Attitudes:  On the Roads to Beatitude for Post-Beat Writers, Dharma Bums, and Cultural-Political Activists is just out with New Pacific Press.

Co-sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Literature Department, and the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund.