Trap Door Poetry: Guest Poets

Louisa Castrodale is a local teacher, poet and artist. Her work has
appeared in Desert Woman, Askew, the Intriguist and Phantom Seed. She
published a chapbook, "Forgotten As A Dream" in 2007. Currently,
Louisa's poetry is published twice monthly by the Valley Breeze in her
column entitled, "Lexicon of Love".

Ruth Nolan, was born in San Bernardino and grew up in the Mojave Desert, and is Associate Professor of English College of the Desert in Palm Desert, where she teaches poetry, creative writing, native American and desert literature, and advises the college literary arts magazine, Solstice. For two summer seasons, 1986-87, she worked for the BLM as a helicopter hotshot and engine crew firefighter in the California Desert District, and has extensively hiked, traveled, and embraced the essence of her desert homeland. Her poetry collections include: Negotiating With Testosterone (1995, Northern Arizona University;) Wild Wash Road (1996) and Dry Waterfall (2008) (Petroglyph Books.) Her poems have also recently appeared in Pacific Review, Mosaic, Above the Treeline: 2008 Anthology of So Cal Haiku Study Group, Poemeleon, San Gabriel Valley Quarterly, Fishtrap Anthology 2007, San Diego Poetry Annual 2007, and Inlandia: A Literary Journey through Southern California's Inland Empire (Heyday Books, 2006.) Ruth is also editing an anthology of California desert literature, also for Heyday Books, to be published in 2009. She is advisor and editor of the new California desert literary magazine, Phantom Seed and advisor to the College of the Desert literary/visual arts magazine, Solstice, www.solsticemagazine.org She is twice a Vermont Studio Residency Recipient, and is on the advisory committee for the Riverside Library/Heyday Books Inlandia Center, which promotes the visual, literary, and performing arts throughout southern California’s Inland Empire and desert regions.

Born and raised in Canada, Randolph has lived in California almost half his life and is a dual citizen. He has been writing poetry for 30 years and was involved in the literary scenes in Vancouver, British Columbia, Santa Barbara, and now Palm Springs where he's lived for 9 years. In Santa Barbara he was one of a neo-beat quartet of poets and musicians who did gigs at coffee houses, colleges and art galleries. In Palm Springs he's been involved in facilitating the visual arts as well as literature, and has given several readings. Before the days of computer he hand-made books of his poetry and stories for friends. When he got his first computer he used it to put together four chap books in the late 80's and early 90's, all of which are now out of print. His "to be published" drawer contains hope and a large collection of poems, two novels, a racy memoir, plus voluminous journals. He published five issues of "The Intriguist," a literary magazine he started and edited.

Patricia D'Alessandro, essayist/poet/artist, has published a Memoir, six poetry collections, and is working on her seventh
to be published in 2008. Formerly a Sacramento cultural arts activist for 15 years, she received a LifeTime Achievement
Award from the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors, in March, 2007. Currently residing in the Coachella Valley,
she hosts the Barnes&Noble/Palm Desert/Westfield Center's "Valley Voices of the Muse" monthly poetry series.
She resides in Desert Hot Springs.

View Dessa's Web page for bio and photo

Maureen Alsop's poems have appeared or are pending in various publications
including: Agni, Tampa Review, New Delta Review, The Cortland Review, Barrow
Street, Typo, Columbia Journal and Texas Review. Her poetry was nominated four
times for the Pushcart Prize. She is the winner of Harpur Palate's Milton
Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and Bitter Oleanderʼs Frances Locke Memorial
Award for Poetry. Her first full collection of poetry, Apparition Wren was
recently released. Her second manuscript, The Diction of Moths is pending
publication in 2009.

Mary Sojourner, NPR commentator and author of Solace: rituals of loss
and desire; Bonelight: ruin and grace in the New Southwest; Delicate:
stories; and the novel, Sisters of the Dream will read
for.............................. She was the Virginia Piper Center
Distinguished Writer in Residence at Arizona State University in
November, 2007 and teaches writing throughout the Southwest. She
write to record Bone and Blood History, for the elegant connections of
the natural world, and in unsparing witness. She reports from the
edges: "I am a spy from the ephemeral and ravaged border.
"I stepped out of a mirage on the horizon between 29 Palms and Cadiz.
The dust on my hair and shoulders caught first light. This corolla
was not visible to me. Because I was alone, it was visible to no-one.
---from a work in progress: Hoodoo Love:
writing the ephemeral West

Ching-In Chen is the author of The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, forthcoming February 2009). Past occupations include karaoke singer, flautist, 1st grade literacy teacher, community organizer, construction job counselor, and a severely lost person in the Rocky Mountains. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Water~Stone Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, OCHO and Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves. A Kundiman Fellow, Ching-In is currently in the MFA program at UC Riverside.

Mike Cipra’s first job was making toe tags—metal disks undertakers wire to the feet of corpses to identify stiffs as human beings who formerly lived. Mike has also worked for seven years as a park ranger, leading tours into 1000-year-old cliff dwellings, crawling through ice-filled lava tubes, and designing environmental education programs for K-12 students that require, among other shady practices, blindfolding kids and encouraging them to bowl for scorpions. Energized by intersections with different cultures and perspectives, Mike has lived in Nepal and Indonesia, where he worked as a DJ and frolicked with rehabilitating orangutans. Currently, Mike serves as the California Desert Program Manager for the non-profit National Parks Conservation Association, and as editor for The Stone Magazine, a photographic and literary arts magazine printed on 100% post-consumer-waste recycled paper (www.thestonemagazine.com). His short stories have been printed in two Danger City anthologies from Contemporary Press, and his play, The Mummy and the Bodhisattva, was produced in June 2008 at Cherry Lane Theater as part of NYC’s Downtown Urban Theater Festival. He is honored to contribute to the Trapdoor poetry series.

Caryn Davidson
Biography

I have been a park ranger in the education office of Joshua Tree National Park for ten years. Previous experiences include working in Special Education, translating from French into English, teaching the former language (who knows what it is now), and working for the French government. I recently conducted a scientific experiment in which I tried to prove that it is never too late to become a yoga teacher.