January 12th, 2015 Revised!

We are beginning our second year of 2nd Mondays Poetry Party at Gatsby Books. What better way to begin than have a local Long Beach double header with Donna Hilbert and Tamara Madison! These two powerhouse women are also organizers of the Long Beach Poetry Festival held each fall.

Reading will begin at 7 pm with signups for the open reading list at 6:45. Gatsby Books is located at 5535 E. Spring St., Long Beach, CA 90808. RSVP on Facebook.

Just added a third reader!

Los Angeles native Amélie Frank is the author of five poetry collections, and her work has appeared in print and online in numerous local, national, and international publications. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing at U.C. Irvine, where she studied fiction with Oakley Hall and poetry with Robert Peters and the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Charles Wright. She founded The Sacred Beverage Press with poet Matthew Niblock and produced the acclaimed literary journal Blue Satellite as well as poetry collections by FrancEyE, The Carma Bums, and Ellyn Maybe. Amélie has served as an editor, publisher, a judge for poetry and spoken word contests, a director of the Valley Contemporary Poets, a member of the Beyond Baroque Board of Trustees, and coordinated The Big Picture: a documentary photograph of the largest group of Southern California poets ever gathered for a single event (which earned a proclamation from California Governor Gray Davis).

She has received the Spirit of Venice Award (2003), a certificate of appreciation from the Los Angeles City Council (2007), and Beyond Baroque’s Distinguished Service Award (2012). Her biography appears in both Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who of American Women. She is at work on her next book, and she is nowhere near as boring as this sounds.

Donna Hilbert was born in the Red River Valley of Oklahoma near the Texas border but has spent most of her life in Southern California. She is a graduate of California State University, Long Beach. Her latest book is The Congress of Luminous Bodies, Aortic books, 2013. Other books include The Green Season, World Parade Books 2009; Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems, PEARL Editions, 2004; Transforming Matter, PEARL 2000; Feathers and Dust, Deep Red, andMansions, all from Event Horizon Press. In 1994 she won the Staple First Edition writing award resulting in the publication in England of the short story collection, Women who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them. Her Greatest Hits chapbook, which includes her most anthologized poems from 1989-2000, is available from Pudding House. Her work is the subject of the short film “Grief Becomes Me,” by director Christine Fugate, and is included in the now completed Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story, the documentary about her life and work.

Tamara Madison is the author of the collection “Wild Domestic” (Pearl Editions; July, 2011) and the chapbook “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions, 2004). Her work has appeared in numerous small press journals and anthologies. Two of her poems have also been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac. Tamara is a California native who grew up on a citrus farm in the Coachella Valley. She has two grown children and teaches French and English in a high school in Los Angeles.