D.A. POWELL

D.A., known to friends, students, and colleagues  as Doug, gave a Zoom reading for City College  students this Fall 2020 along with Maw Shein Win.  He reminded the audience that “poetry isn’t a job,  it isn’t capitalism” and read poems that ranged from  comic descriptions of working in a movie theater as  a college student to grave meditations on living with  AIDS in poems such as “Chronic” which speaks to  these times of pandemic and climate catastrophe: 

choose your own adventure: drug failure or organ failure 

cataclysmic climate change 

or something akin to what’s killing the bees —  colony collapse 

more like us than we’d allow, this wondrous swatch of rough 

Doug made his start in poetry in California community  colleges. He attended Yuba College and Santa Rosa  College before moving on to Sonoma State University,  where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1991, and  his master’s degree in 1993. He received his MFA degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1996. He  is now a professor at the University of San Francisco. Powell is the author of the trilogy of books Tea (Wesleyan University Press, 1998), Lunch (Wesleyan  University Press, 2000), and Cocktails (Graywolf Press,  2004), which was nominated for the National Book  Critics Circle Award.

MAW SHEIN WIN

Maw Shein Win is a Bay Area writer, editor, and  educator. She was an artist in resident at the  Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, a 2019  Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley, and the first Poet  Laureate of El Cerrito. Her first full length poetry  collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was published in  2018. Her collaborative book with paintings by artist  Mark Dutcher, Ruins of a Glittering Palace, was  _{published by SPA}^/Commonwealth Projects. Her  poetry chapbook Score and Bone is on Nomadic  Press. Her full-length collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. Her second  full-length collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House is available from Omnidawn Publishing. In this  collection, Maw uses physical objects to explore  the spiritual, taking us through different worlds:  California, Burma, and beyond. 

In Fall 2020, Maw Shein Win joined us for CCSF’s  Creative Writers’ Reading Series and shared poems  from Storage Unit for the Spirit House with our  community. She and D.A. Powell also took part in  a wonderful Q&A segment after the reading where  we learned about her writing habits, the inspirations  for her newest book, and her artistic practices  beyond poetry.