Spring Catamaran Launch Party
6:00pm Reception; Readings at 6:30pm

Catamaran Literary Reader, founded in 2012, is located in the Tannery Art Center in Santa Cruz. This beautiful, high quality, full-color quarterly magazine features fine art, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. The contributing artists and writers come from California and beyond. It has a loyal following of readers who celebrate culture, arts, books and museums. Catamaran also features a poetry prize for West Coast poets and an annual Catamaran Writing Conference during the summer. Visit the website at www.catamaranliteraryreader.com.

Mechanics' Institute is delighted to collaborate with Catamaran to celebrate their Spring 2023 edition. Featured writers include Margit Liesche, Megan Moodie, Gail Newman, Lisa Ortiz, Rajeev Prasad, Paul Skenazy, and Jeanne Wagner, who will read from their works.

This program is hosted by Founder and Editor-in-Chief Catherine Segurson and poet and Contributing Editor Zack Rogow.

Join the reception at 6pm, with readings beginning at 6:30pm to 7:30pm, followed by a tour of Mechanics' Institute for interested guests.

Zack Rogow is the author, editor, or translator of more than twenty books or plays. His translations of French literature include two books by Colette, Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island and Other Previously Untranslated Gems, co-translated with Renée Morel; and the novel Green Wheat, short-listed for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Prize. Rogow coauthored the play Colette Uncensored, which had its first staged reading at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and ran in London, Catalonia, San Francisco, and Portland, and was included in the Fête de Colette at Mechanics' Institute in January 2023. He has received the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his co-translation of Earthlight by André Breton, and the Northern California Book Reviewers Award in Translation for his English version of George Sand’s novel Horace.

Catherine Segurson is the founder of the nonprofit literary journal Catamaran based in Santa Cruz. She has served as Catamaran’s publisher and editor-in-chief for 10 years and has published 40 quarterly editions of the magazine. She is also the founder of the annual poetry book prize Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets, for which she has served as the book publisher for five collections of poetry over the past 5 years of the prize. She is also the founder and conference manager for the Catamaran Writing Conference in Pebble Beach, now in its 10 th year. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Megan Moodie suffers from a genetic connective tissue disorder called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. She is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Film Quarterly, MUTHA Magazine, and Sapiens, and her 2018 essay “Birthright,” which appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review (vol. 26), was named a Notable Essay of the Year by Best American Essays (2019). She is currently at work on a book that expands on this work.

Gail Newman’s poems have appeared in journals, including Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Atlanta Review. Her second collection of poetry, Blood Memory, chosen by Marge Piercy for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, won the 2020 Northern California Publishers and Authors Gold Award for Poetry, and the 2021 American Book Fest Best Book Award in the Religious Poetry category. Newman lives in San Francisco and Sebastopol, California.

Margit Liesche has three previously published novels Triptych, Lipstick and Lies, and Hollywood Buzz, all featuring strong women protagonists, with Triptych, partially set in Budapest, spun loosely from family stories. “The Ocean Between Us,” a personal essay about her journey to a deeper understanding of her Hungarian refugee mother was published in the Chicago Quarterly Review and was designated notable in The Best American Essays. Margit lives in Marin County, CA where she hikes the trails with her dog Tango every chance she gets.

Lisa Allen Ortiz’s second poetry collection Stem was published by Lost Horse Press in 2022 and The Blinding Star, Selected Poems of Blanca Varela, a collaboratively translated work by Ortiz and Sara Danielle Rivera, won the 2022 Poetry in Translation prize at the Northern California Book Awards.

Rajeev Prasad studied philosophy at Northwestern and obtained his Medical Degree at the Medical College of Wisconsin. His work appears in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, All World Wayfarer Lit mag, and Catamaran Literary. Follow him on twitter @RajeevWriter

Paul Skenazy grew up in Chicago, and moved to California for graduate school. He taught literature and writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He wrote book reviews for the Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post, and other newspaper and magazines, as well as critical books on James M. Cain and other noir writers. He is the author of two novels: Temper, CA (Miami University Press, 2019), winner of the Miami University Press Novella Contest, and Still Life (Paper Angel Press, 2021). He lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife, the poet Farnaz Fatemi.

Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections. Her most recent, Everything Turns into Something Else, was published in 2020 as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. She is the winner of the 2021 Joy Harjo Poetry Award and the 2022 Cloudbank Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, SWWIM, and The Southern Review.

Copies of Catamaran will be on sale at the event.

Mechanics Institute Members & Friends of Catamaran FREE

Public sliding scale, $5 to $10