Two segments of open mic will be available and refreshments will be served. Suggested donation $5 per person for the cost of refreshments and to donate to the Little Landers Society that manages the Bolton Hall Museum, a Los Angeles Historical Landmark built in 1913.
KATERINA CANYON
Katerina Canyon is a 2020 and 2019 Pushcart Prize Nominee. Her stories have been published in the New York Times and Huffington Post. From 2000 to 2003, she served as the Poet Laureate of Sunland-Tujunga. During that time, she started a poetry festival and ran several poetry readings. She was featured in the Los Angeles Times and was awarded the Montesi Award from Saint Louis University in 2011, 2012, and 2013. She has published multiple chapbooks and an album.
While living in Sunland-Tujunga, she was active in the local community, coaching girls basketball, teaching writing classes through the McGroarty Arts Center, and organizing both the Sunland-Tujunga Poetry Festival and local poetry slams. She also hosted the Eccentric Moon Poetry Reading Series at Tujunga Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.
She has been a featured poet in multiple venues across the country, including Beyond Baroque, Nuyorican, The Bowery Poetry Club and Chance Operations. She teaches poetry workshops to children and at universities. Her latest book, Surviving Home, was a Heartland Review finalist. She currently lives in Seattle, Washington, where she can often be found writing poetry near Pier 55.
More information on her website: https://www.poetickat.com/
Village Poets presented Canyon on zoom in November 2021:
https://villagepoets.blogspot.com/2021/10/village-poets-present-katerina-canyon.html
Link to Video from the reading https://youtu.be/E0oN1CvHNGY
Staring Across the Atlantic
My people were born underwater
In the hulls of slave ships.
My people were pulled from farms in Nigeria
From trade ships along the Nile river
From the rainforests of Cameroon.
My people were tossed in cages
With people who didn’t speak their language,
But we learned to speak a new tongue
From the end of the whip’s lash.
We learned the mood of the ocean.
We learned to read the stars through knot holes,
And to sing songs in tune with the waves.
That’s when we became American.
We were slaves to the British, the Dutch, the Portuguese,
We were even slaves to the Cherokee.
We not only marched the Trail of Tears
We carried their bags, their homes,
Their children on our backs.
We have fought in every single war
Since the American Revolution.
We are not America, but we are American.
As the years passed, we forgot the Baka, the Nok, the Hyksos
But in our songs, our jazz, our blues,
We can hear their ghosts.
That’s why we are Africa but not African.
We are cultural orphans
Grasping for the hem of our mother’s dress.
KAREN WINTERS
Karen Winters is a native Californian, for whom "art and the love of nature have been lifelong passions." She received my BA from UCLA, with a minor in Art History. A subsequent masters in journalism (also from UCLA) led to an award-winning career in advertising, followed by new ventures in broadcast news and documentary film making. Through all the years and all the travels, a sketchbook has been her steady companion, recording Egyptian archaeological digs, the movements of killer whales, or the dances of Tibetan monks. Now a full-time artist, she actively travels and paints on location throughout California and the western United States.
She writes: "My work is inspired by the natural world, whether the medium I choose is watercolor, oil, acrylic or pastel. I am most interested in capturing the quality of light as it defines a landscape, a still life or floral portrait. I make a practice of painting daily, either in studio or, my preference, in the beautiful California landscape. I would characterize my style as borrowing from the best of impressionism and realism. Among my historical influences have been tonalist George Inness, Edgar Payne, J Bond Francisco, and many of the other early California impressionists."
Through group and solo shows, her work has been exhibited at the Autry National Museum, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, the Riverside Museum of Art, the San Luis Obispo Art Museum, the Santa Paula Art Museum, the Riverside Museum of Art, The Pasadena Museum of History, the Long Beach Museum of Art, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in LA, and is in the collection of the Huntington Library. Her paintings have been in National Watercolor Society shows, and won awards at Bowers Museum invitational events.
Affiliations: Artist member, California Art Club; American Impressionist Society; Pasadena Society of Artists.
Selected Recent Juried Exhibitions and Awards
2021
Art Tehachapi Plein Air Invitational
Mars: An Artistic Mission - "NASA and JPL, Bringing worlds together" - California Art Club
Welcome to California -"Palms of Dawn" - California Art Club
"Aqua Activated" show, Pasadena Society of Artists
2020
U.S. Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan, "Upper Yosemite Falls, Yosemite National Park" On loan to the embassy until 2022 as part of the "Art in Embassies" program of the U.S. Dept. of State.
Pasadena Museum of History - Art Night exhibition and demonstration
"The Golden State" - Old Mill, California Art Club
2019
Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History "Magnificent Migrations" "Red Fox"
Gold Medal Show, California Art Club "California Roll Sushi" - Pasadena Museum of California Art
Spring Show - "Quiet Spring Reflections" Old Mill, California Art Club
Summer Show - "Calafia Cliffs, San Clemente" Old Mill, California Art Club
Autumn Impressions: Painting the American Landscape, Muckenthaler Cultural Center, Fullerton, CA "Cottonwood Breezes"
2018
Yosemite Renaissance 34 - Yosemite Museum and Gallery, Yosemite National Park "Yosemite Awakening"
Art Matters - Huntington Museum and Botanical Gardens "Delphinium Dance"
Signs of Spring - A Day in the Garden - Old Mill, California Art Club "Blue Heron Lake"
Canyons to Coves - Old Mill, California Art Club - "Sculpted by Time"
SLOPOKE Fine Art of the West, Juried Exhibition and Sale (October 2018), Solvang, CA
2017
Descanso Gardens - Sturt Haaga Gallery juried "Bloom" show "Clivias" and "Descanso Sunflowers"
"Idyllic Impressions" - Old Mill, California Art Club
"Journey down the California Coast" - Old Mill, California Art Club
