featured poets Judith Terzi & Mary Torregrossa

Judith Terzi is the author of the new Museum of Rearranged Objects (Kelsay Books) as well as five chap-books including If You Spot Your Brother Floating By And Casbah (Kattywompus Press). Her poems appear in literary journals and anthologiesincluding Columbia Journal, Good Works Review, Main Street Rag, Moria, Raintown Review, Spillway, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Her poems have garnered prizes and have been nominated for Best of the Net and Web. "Ode to Malala Yousafzai" was included in Keynotes, a study guide for the artist-in-residence program for State Theater New Jersey, and was recently read on the "Words and Music" series of the BBC/Radio 3. She holds an M.A. in French Literature and is a former educator who taught high school French language and literature for many years as well as English at California State University, Los Angeles, and in Algiers, Algeria.

Storyteller Mary Torregrossa is also a story listener. Listening is a practice honed by her job as an ESL teacher in Southern California. Originally from Rhode Island, she blends experiences from both coasts into her poetry. Her chapbook, My Zocalo Heart, is published by Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poems appear in Bearing The Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems, in Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, and in Voices From Leimert Park Redux, an anthology of “observers and keepers of culture” from the World Stage in Los Angeles as well as in Full of MoonLight, an anthology of the Haiku Society of America.  Individual poems appear in the Poems of Arrival Project, by artist ShinPei Takeda at the New Americans Museum in San Diego, in Poet Laureate Juan Fellipe Herrera’s Poems for Unity project and in Lament For The Dead, a project honoring victims of gun violence.