CLAUDIA HANDLER & LAUREL ANN BOGEN

Claudia Handler was one of six poets chosen by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center and the Los Angeles Poetry Festival to participate in the Poets/ALOUD Series in 2006. New work has been included in the anthology A Poets Haggadah: Passover Through the Eyes of Poets, edited by Rick Lupert, creator of the Poetry Super Highway. Handler’s poems have also appeared in various printed literary journals, and online. She is also the author of the full-length poetry collection, Going Under, published in 2007.

Handler appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Live Wire Radio” for their Special Anniversary Show, broadcast in April 2007 and featured in their Favorite Moments of 2007 Show, which aired February 2008. She has also appeared on The Moe Green Poetry Hour, and Breathe.

Claudia is a guest lecturer at University of California at Northridge and the co-director of Valley Contemporary Poets, an organization dedicated to bringing poetry to the San Fernando Valley and greater Los Angeles area. A native New Yorker, Claudia moved to California in 2002 and makes her living as a counselor, helping people to get out from under avalanches of fear and sadness.

LAUREL ANN BOGEN

Laurel Ann Bogen is a poet and teacher and performance artist living in Los Angeles. She is the author of ten books including the poetry collections: Washing a Language, Fission, The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies, The Burning, Do Iguanas Dance Under the Moonlight? and Rag Tag We Kiss. And fiction including The Great Orange Leonard Scandal, and The Projects.

Bogen was literary curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 1996 to 2002, coordinating the Writers In Focus poetry series. She is a founding member of the critically acclaimed poetry-performance ensemble, Nearly Fatal Women, which has performed in the Knitting Factory in New York, Cornell University, Beyond Baroque/Literary Arts Center, and the Cast Theater in Hollywood. She won the Outstanding Instructor of the Year award in 2008 from UCLA Extension in Creative Writing, and Los Angeles Weekly named her Best Female Poet/Performer in their Best of L.A. issue. She has also received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Pacificus Foundation. Bogen’s work has appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies as well as at Zuzu's Petals, Zero City, Spoken War, and The Open Ended It. Check out the scoop on her excellent books at the Unlikely Stories bookstore.