Featured poets Lynne Thompson and Carine Topal

Winner of  2017 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Prize, the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize in 2016, and a Master Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles for 2015-16, poet Lynne Thompson is the author of Start With a Small Guitar and Beg No Pardon, winner of the Perugia Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award.  Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Prairie Schooner, African American Review, Poetry, as well as the anthology Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Thompson is Reviews and Essays Editor for the literary journal, Spillway.

Carine Topal was born in New York and earned her MA from New York University. She has lived in Jerusalem, Israel, where she worked with Palestinian merchants in the West Bank and Bethlehem. She was also employed by the Office of Assimilation, and worked with new Russian immigrants. . She participated in the grassroots organization California Poets in the Schools, was the Poet-in-Residence for the City of Manhattan Beach and Poet-in-Education for Manhattan Beach elementary schools. In 1994, her first collection of poetry, God As Thief, was published by The Amagansett Press. she was honored with the Excellence in Arts Award from the City of Torrance, California. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she is the recipient of The Briar Cliff Review Nineteenth Annual Poetry Award of 2015, and Tattooed, her collection of Holocaust poems, was the winner of the Palettes and Quills 4th Biennial Poetry Chapbook Contest of the same year. Topal’s 4th collection, In Order of Disappearance, is forthcoming from the Pacific Coast Poetry Series. Carine lives in La Quinta, California and conducts poetry and memoir workshops in the Los Angeles and Palm Springs area.