17th Annual Literary Arts Festival

MONDAY, APRIL 29

11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m., Griffin Gate

Why Literature Matters: An Interdisciplinary Panel

featuring Dr. Pete Schmidt, Dr. Oralee Holder, Dean Agustin Albarrán, and student Cassady Lynch

The 17th Annual Literature Arts Festival begins with a panel discussion for anyone who reads, studies or teaches literature.  "Why Literature Matters" argues the role and potential of literature to effect change and cultivate humanity in, both, a personal and global way.  Panel members will include Dr. Oralee Holder, English Department Chair; Dr. Pete Schmidt, Humanities Professor; Agustin Albarrán, Dean of English and Behavioral/Social Sciences; and Grossmont College student Cassady A. Lynch, who is majoring in English/Creative Writing.

About the panelists

Agustin Albarrán: Agustin Albarran, will present on Bless me, Ultimate, by Rudolfo Anaya, and other narratives in Hispanic literature focusing on Magical Realism.  Additionally, Albarran will present his own personal narrative about the important role played by family storytelling in his exploration of his Mexican-American heritage.  In January 2013, Albarran officially became Dean of English and Behavioral and Social Sciences. Additionally, he chaired the World Arts and Cultures Committee and serves as a tri-chair on Grossmont College's Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. 

Dr. Oralee Holder: Examining poems by William Carlos Williams, Billy Collins and Yusef Komunyakaa, Dr. Oralee Holder presents a moving and thoughtful lecture on how the "news" of poetry helps us to connect to one another on an emotional level in times of contemporary crisis.  Dr. Holder received her M.A. from Southern Illinois University and holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of New Mexico.  In addition to having taught American literature at Grossmont College for many years, Dr. Holder has been English Department Chair since 2007 and serves on the Council of Chairs and Coordinators.  

Cassady A. Lynch: Born with a cleft palate, Cass Lynch will recount how the emotional and physical challenges she faced inspired her to turn to favorite authors for supportive guidance and forge a lifelong relationship with literature that, Lynch believes, quite literally saved her life.  Cassady Lynch is completing an A.A. in Creative Writing at Grossmont College this spring and will be transferring to San Diego State University in fall of 2013.  Lynch describes herself as "an aspiring tweed-coated academic with a love of warm whiskey on cold nights and the scent of mildly wet dog tinging the air of a bedroom grossly overpopulated by an obsessive tome horde." Her publications include The Far East: Everything Just As It Is and the forthcoming A Year In Ink (Vol. VI). 

Dr. Pete Schmidt: Dr. Schmidt's presentation, "Literature, Culture, Values, and Change," will use specific examples to explain how literature from the past gives us insight into how humans have viewed themselves and their relation to the world, and how that image shifts through historical time. Dr. Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Humanities, and Religious Studies at Grossmont College.  In 2006, he completed his Ph.D. in the History of Science and Technology Graduate Program at the University of Minnesota, for which his dissertation research focused on the history of terraforming science.  He also plays drums in a two-man acoustic Punk Rock band.

2:00 -  3:15 p.m. Griffin Gate

poet Dunya Mikhail, author of The War Works Hard

The Creative Writing Program, with a generous grant from the World Arts and Cultures Committee of Grossmont College, proudly welcomes award-winning Chaldean American poet Dunya Mikhail to Griffin Gate.  Mikhail will read from her highly acclaimed collection of poems, The War Works Hard.

Born in Bagdad, Iraq, Dunya Mikhail has authored four collections of poetry: The Psalms of Absence (1993); Almost Music (1997); The Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (1999); and, The War Works Hard (2005).  Poems from Mikhail's earlier works, Psalms of Absence and Almost Music, were subsequently retranslated by Elizabeth Winslow and incorporated into Mikhail's two later collections.  In fact, The War Works Hard has earned its translator, Elizabeth Winslow, the PEN Translation Award. The War Works Hards has garnered numerous recognitions, including the Arab American Book Award, and was named by the New York Public Library as one of the twenty-five books to remember; it was also shortlisted for the 2006 International Griffin Poetry Prize, Canada’s most respected poetry award.  Many of her poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies such as World Beat: International Poetry Now (New Directions, 2006), Flowers of Flame: Unheard Voices of Iraq (Michigan State University Press, 2008); and Iraqi Poetry Today (Modern Poetry in Translation, 2002).  She is also listed in Arab Women Writers: A Critical Reference Guide, 1873-1999 (American University in Cairo Press, 2008). Bilingual in Arabic and English, Mikhail served as Literary Editor and translator for The Baghdad Observer in the mid 1990s, during which time her writings were branded "subversive" and made her the target of threats and harassment by Iraqi authorities; she fled to the U.S. soon afterward, where she pursued Near Eastern Studies at Wayne State University. In 2001, the United Nations awarded Dunya Mikhail its Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Mikhail currently lives in Michigan as Instructor of Arabic in the Linguistics and Languages Department of Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan.

Dunya Mikhail’s writing voices the inner life of modern refugees unable to articulate their own personal war-torn histories.  Phoebe Pettingell, reviewer for The New Leader, writes, “When will there be another society that produces poets in Mikhail’s tradition? If you want to understand how disastrously an ancient culture has been affected by its recent history, [Mikhail’s poetry] will tell you more than any film clips, news stories or books about Middle Eastern battles.  Sometimes verse becomes the only language adequate to express the struggles of evolution or the depredations of human conflict.” Contemporary artists and authors like Mikhail hold the resonant power to voice the complex and difficult story of these populations, and possess the skills to articulate their truths. 

7:00 - 9 p.m., Griffin Gate

New Voices: A Student Reading

The biannual tradition continues:  New Voices: A Student Reading features this semester's standout Creative Writing student writers reading their original short fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, novel excerpts, drama, and mixed media literary works.  This popular event is often well attended by students, faculty, family, friends, and the public of the greater Grossmont-Cuyamaca community.   Students are personally invited by their Creative Writing instructors to be included in the program, where they receive a well-earned opportunity to read their own work aloud, sometimes with remarkable performance ability.  Past New Voices readings have featured musical accompaniment, spoken word and hip hop performances, song, and video projects.

The Creative Writing Program continues to inspire students, and the recognition that comes with being selected for the Student Reading each semester is often their first initiation into the arena of public literary performance that helps them to discover their writer's voice.  Each reading features a printed program containing the text of the works presented that evening, but there is also an on-line version of the latest program posted immediately after the each reading, which you can visit right now to see the original works of last semester's talented writers, as well as find further info about the authors in their own words.  You can even contact them to praise them about their writing.

TUESDAY, APRIL 30

9:30 - 10:45 a.m., Griffin Gate

Write Out Loud: California Gold

Write Out Loud returns to the Grossmont College Literary Arts Festival.  Write Out Loud, the brainchild of co-founders Walter Ritter and Veronica Murphy, is a dynamic and dramatic performance of short fiction and poetry staged by professional actors.  Past  "Write Out Loud" events have featured "Against the Odds"; “Leaves and Turns”; "Stories of Love and Passion"; "Science Squared"; and "Giving Season."   Last year's Write Out Loud program celebrated the godfather of American Gothic, Edgar Allen Poe. 

This year's theme, California Gold, will celebrate the verse, fiction, and nonfiction of California's rich history during the last several centuries, including the Gold Rush.  The alchemy for "California Gold" is achieved in adapting selected short stories and verse into miniature dramas, "treasured stories of our state great and small."  Some of the authors showcased in the performance include John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, and Robinson Jeffers.

Artistic Director, Co-Founder Veronica Murphy is a twenty year veteran of the San Diego stage and has acted with local companies including Cygnet Theatre Company, Lamb’s Players Theatre, North Coast Repertory Theatre, and Tonic Productions.  Executive Director, Co-Founder Walter Ritter works with Ion Theatre and Lynx Performance and in the past has performed at Lamb’s Players Theatre, Sledgehammer, Moonlight Stage, Starlight and many others.  From the official Write Out Loud on the Internet:  "Write Out Loud is committed to inspire, challenge and entertain by reading short stories aloud for a live audience . . . . Many of us were read to as children – by mothers, grandfathers, teachers. But as adults, we rarely have the opportunity to sit back and listen to a story read to us aloud." 

12:30 - 1:45 p.m., Griffin Gate

Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the “Mexican” in America

Texas-born William Nericcio, a.k.a. Memo Nericcio, received his English BA from the University of Texas in 1984 under the mentorship of Ramon Saldivar, Richard Simon, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Elizabeth Cullingford.  He completed his PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 1989, where he served as a researcher and teaching assistant to Carlos Fuentes at the A.D. White House Society for the Humanities. His dissertation, The Politics of Solitude: Alienation in the Literatures of the Americas, was directed by Enrico Mario Santí, and members of his dissertation committee included the renowned Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Nericcio is now Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University in California, where he also serves on the faculty of the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies and directs a cultural studies graduate program known as MALAS (the Master of Arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences), an interdisciplinary studies program. Nericcio's primary ongoing critical work, Tex{t}-Mex: Seductive Hallucinations of the "Mexican" In America, is an illustrated history of Mexican and Latina/o stereotypes in which Nericcio creates a provocative and highly entertaining mixed-media book/performance that deconstructs Tex{t}-Mexicans in films, television, advertising, comic books, toys, literature, and even critical theory, which reveals them to be less flesh-and-blood than "seductive hallucinations." Nericcio humorously reveals how American cultural creators “have invented and used these and other Tex{t}-Mexicans since the Mexican Revolution of 1910, thereby exposing the stereotypes, agendas, phobias, and intellectual deceits that drive American popular culture” (University of Texas Press).  

In 2007, the American Library Association awarded Tex{t}-Mex “Outstanding Academic Title” in the category of Film Studies.  Nericcio's next book, Eyegiene, is due soon for release from University of Texas Press.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 01

11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m., Griffin Gate

The Literature of Tobias Wolff: 

American Literature II Student Paper Presentations, and Readings by the winners and finalists of the English 98 This Boy's [Or Girl's] Life Writing Contest

English 98 and 98R students who are winners and finalists of the English 98 Writing Contest will read manuscripts about theme of journeying, inspired by "Fortune," the first chapter of Tobias Wolff's groundbreaking novel, This Boy's Life.  Winners receive gift certificates, and selected manuscripts are included in a special 'zine for the project, which will be presented to Tobias Wolff at his reading at 7:00 p.m. on May 1.  This year's winners are, First Place: Jenna Odneal, "A Smile to the Eyes" (Instructor: Karl Sherlock); Second Place: Mariah J. Boyd, "The Journey of a Bullet" (Instructor: Sydney Brown); Third Place: Pedro Dominguez "Across the Border: The Journey of an Immigrant Boy" (Instructor: Kristin McGregor). Honorable Mentions: Jolene Smith (Instructor: Karl Sherlock); Constance Herd (Instructor: Karl Sherlock); Ricardo Soria (Instructor: Joan Ahrens); Daniel Gerke (Instructor: Tate Hurvitz); Norma Hernandez (Instructor: Tate Hurvitz); Michael Faulkner (Instructor: Kristen McGregor)

2:00 -  3:15 p.m. Griffin Gate

Tobias Wolff: Art of the Short Story

Panel Presentation by Stephanie Mood, Ryan Griffith, and Rob Williams

Readying audiences for Tobias Wolff's evening reading, Literature and Creative Writing instructors Stephanie Mood, Ryan Griffith and Rob Williams panel a discussion of Tobias Wolff's pioneering contributions to the genre of the short story, including "Bullet to the Brain," one of Wolff's most anthologized stories.  

"Art of the Short Story" lectures provided insights into the history of the short story genre, as well as background, influences and techniques found in Tobias Wolff's writing.  "Art of the Short Story" is the penultimate event celebrating the Festival's headlining author, which culminated on Wednesday evening with Tobias Wolff's reading and book signing and began on Tuesday afternoon, April 29, with a private Master Class in which selected students, faculty and administrators enjoyed an intimate dialogue with the author, who spoke candidly about his life and career and answered questions about his writing process, his inspiration, and his techniques for specific works.  Selected students from this semester's Creative Writing classes and finalists in the English 98 "The Boy's [and Girl's] Life" Writing Contest were invited to attend.  A volume of the winning manuscripts was presented to Wolff the next evening. A catered reception for the author immediately followed the Master Class, where Wolff continued to converse casually and answer further questions about his writing.  

Stephanie Mood will present an overview of the short story as a genre of fiction writing, including Tobias Woolf's contributions to its development.  Mood received her M.A. from Ball State University. Now a retired Grossmont College Creative instructor, Mood first began teaching at Grossmont College in the mid 1970s, along with her husband, John.  In addition to teaching the Short Fiction Writing workshop, Mood pioneered Grossmont College's first Native American Literature course and in 1995 co-founded the Literary Arts Festival; in fact, she is primarily responsible for bringing Tobias Wolff to the 17th Annual L.A.F.  Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have appeared in Minnesota Review, Cedar Rock, Poem, Poetry Newsletter, Antenna, Impact, Encore, Astronomy Magazine, and Griffith Observer.  In 2012, her book of poems and short fiction, California Poems: Gold in Them Hills, was published by XLibris Press.   

Ryan Griffith discuss the literary influences on Tobias Woolf and his written works.  Griffith holds an M.A. in Creative Nonfiction from Fresno State and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from San Diego State. He received the Editor’s Choice prize for best fiction in The Beacon Street Review and was the resident storyteller for The Lounge on KPBS radio, where he read from his acclaimed series, The Midnight Pharmacy.  Most recently his work has appeared in elimae, Dogplotz, Night Train, and Fiction Daily.  His story “Thrill of Fire” was selected as one of the top fifty short short stories of 2012 by Wigleaf Magazine.  During July 2012, he served an artistic residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, where he worked on a novel.  Griffith has taught numerous creative writing classes at Grossmont, including Poetry Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and the introductory course, Creative Writing. 

Rob Williams will examine Tobias Woolf's influences on other contemporary fiction writers, and about the fine line between fiction and autobiography that characterizes much of Tobias Wolff's narratives .  Williams has a B.A. in English from Arizona State University and an MFA from Columbia University.  He is the co-editor of the nonfiction anthology, From Boys To Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up. His essays and short stories have been published in San Diego CityBeat, Maisonneuve Magazine,Versal, Pindeldyboz, and various anthologies including Fool for Love and I Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage. He is a part-time instructor of Creative Writing and English Composition at Grossmont College.

7:00 - 9 p.m., Griffin Gate

novelist, memoirist, and story writer Tobias Wolff, author of This Boy's Life and Old School

We are proud and honored to welcome literary luminary Tobias Wolff to the 17th Annual Literary Arts Festival at Grossmont College!

One of most important American short story authors of our time, the Alabama native Tobias Wolff is best known for pioneering a style of narrative dubbed “Dirty Realism” by some contemporary critics who attribute to Wolff and several of his contemporaries the Renaissance of the American short story genre—a claim with which Wolff adamantly rejects.  During the 1980s, Wolff worked with fellow Dirty Realist Raymond Carver at Syracuse University and was a mentor to graduate students who have since developed into a next generation of narrative authors, including Jay McInerney, Ken Garcia, Alice Sebold, and George Saunders. 

Although predominantly a writer of short stories and memoirs, Tobias Wolff also published several novels that have garnered critical acclaim.  Perhaps his most widely recognized works, however, are his frequently anthologized story, “Bullet To the Brain,” and his memoir about an abusive stepfather, This Boy's Life, which was adapted in 1993 to a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Barkin, and Robert De Niro. The Barracks Thief (Ecco 1984), Wolff’s novella about three Fort Bragg graduates awaiting orders for Vietnam, received the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and has been compared to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.  The Barracks Thief used several unconventional narrative and point-of-view techniques with which Tobias Wolff has become widely known, and sometimes criticized.  His most recent novel, Old School (Knopf 2003), for instance, scandalized some reviewers with an editing idiosyncrasy:  the intentional omission of dialogue quotation marks.  One outraged reviewer for The Atlantic Monthly rebuked the technique as “a ridiculous piece of postmodern pretentiousness . . . ."

Tobias Wolff was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing in 1975 and, after ending his seventeen year tenure at Syracuse University in 1997, returned to Stanford University's Department of English to become a graduate professor.  Wolff has been the recipient of numerous other awards for his writing, including the O. Henry Short Story Prize; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Creative Writing; the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography.  Wolff's latest 2008 collection, Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories, is critically acclaimed as one of the best story collections of his career so far.

THURSDAY, MAY 02

11:00 a.m. - 12:15 p.m., Griffin Gate

Werewolves, Vampires and Zombies—Oh My!

The Not-So-Human in Literature, A Panel Presentation by Lauren Spears, Linda Mitchell, and Lisa Shapiro

Literature instructors and authors from the Grossmont College English Department panel a discussion about images of the inhuman in science fiction, fantasy and horror, featuring a reading by Linda Mitchell, of her new novel about werewolves. Novel Writing instructor Lisa Shapiro will give a presentation on images of the paranormal in literature, and instructor Lauren Spears will present from her dissertation topic on the subject of vampires in literature.

Lauren Spears presents a version of her SDSU Master's Thesis, "A Tale of Two Monsters; or, the Dialectic of Horror," published by Montezuma Press:  an interrogation of the two major archetypal monsters, vampires and zombies, and their respective evolutions ranging from folklore, nineteenth century literature, and finally twentieth century film, television, and pop culture. Spears demonstrates that vampires and zombies are not polar opposites, as they've come to be interpreted by pop culture, but of the same "species," divided by wealth, social privilege, and class.  At SDSU, Spears has taught literature class  Horror, Madness, and Existentialism. In 2012, she began teaching for Grossmont College as an adjunct instructor of English.

Linda Mitchell will be reading a prologue and a chapter from her newly completed urban fantasy novel, Werewolf Whisperer.  Mitchell is an Assistant Professor of English at Grossmont College who has taught English 217: Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature in linked Project Success Program courses since 1993.  She is also a founding member of the California Learning Communities Consortium and serves on its Advisory Committee.  Her novel, Werewolf Whisperer, will be released from Amazon.com by the end of summer 2013; a sequel to the novel is already in development. 

Lisa Shapiro will be presenting The Castle Ghost – Connecting Life and Death in Literature. To research her current novel, which she co-wrote with another author, Lisa  and her co-writer traveled to England, walked historic battlegrounds, combed through castle ruins and explored manor houses. She also studied the process for exhuming human remains. Shapiro is the author of three published novels and numerous published short stories. She teaches English and Business at several colleges in San Diego County, including Southwestern College, Mesa College, and Grossmont College.  She is also a regular instructor for San Diego Writers, Ink, and mediates the popular Unlimited Writing Workshop, which uses guided meditation and journaling to harness the power of the subconscious in order to break through writer's block.  At Grossmont College, Shapiro teaches English 175, the popular Novel Writing workshop in the Creative Writing Program. 

2:00 -  3:15 p.m. Griffin Gate

Judy Reeves: A Writer Is Someone Who Writes, originator of San Diego Writer's Ink and Brown Bag Writing Group

Educator and writer, Judy Reeves, brings her popular and motivating lecture/workshop to Grossmont College.  Reeves, originator of the Brown Bag Writing Group in San Diego and co-founder of the nonprofit literary center San Diego Writers, Ink, and author of A Writer’s Book of Days, A Spirited Companion & Lively Muse for the Writing Life (New World Library, 1999), teaches at University of California, San Diego Extension, San Diego Writers, Ink and other venues. In addition to conducting private workshops, Reeves organizes writing retreats.  Says Reeves, “I believe in the collective energy of writing in group. Even though writing is a solitary act—the work we must do alone—my experience is that writing in group sparks a creative force that, if the writer trusts it and goes with it, can take the writing and the writer to unexpected, surprising places of memory and imagination."

Her many awards include San Diego Writer’s Monthly magazine’s “Woman of the Year” and the 2001 Odin Award for Community Service from the San Diego Writers and Editors Guild.  July 24, 2010 was declared officially by Mayor Jerry Sanders to be San Diego “Judy Reeves Day.” New World Library published a 10th Anniversary Edition of A Writer's Book of Days in fall of 2010, which won "Best Nonfiction" in the San Diego Book Awards for 2010.  In 2012, Reeves published The Appointment Calendar for Writers, a 156-page perpetual calendar with a daily writing prompt to help writers stay committed to writing practice.

7:00 - 9 p.m., Griffin Gate

Lantern Tree: Four Books of Poems, a reading featuring Chris Baron, Heather Eudy, Sabrina Youmans, and Cali Linfor

Lantern Tree demonstrates four poets—Chris Baron, Heather Eudy, Cali Linfor, and Sabrina Youmans—banding together to invest their four separate works into one gloriously rich tapestry of verse.  While each poet retains a separate voice and identity, the book is a poignant chorus in which ugliness and falsehood are examined alongside beauty and truth, but a synergistic solidarity of ideas that comes from this alliance creates an unforgettable mash-up of language, music, and intellect that celebrates the complex abstraction of "home."  Lantern Tree's four authors have made appearances at San Diego City College International Book Fair in 2012, and at the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers Series.

About the authors 

Under The Broom Tree, by Chris Baron. Originally from New York City, Baron credits being raised in a Jewish household of artists for many of the themes and stories pervasive to his poems.  Baron moved to San Diego and received his MFA in Poetry from San Diego State University in 1998. Now a Professor of English and Director of San Diego City College’s Writing Center, Baron served for over a decade on the executive board for the Border Voices Poetry Project.  His work has appeared in Pearl, Sunshine Noir, Aethlon, Literary Ink, San Diego Writer’s Monthly, Sierra Club Press Charlotte Literary Review, Journal of Sport Literature, Mama’s and Papa’s Hunger and Thirst, and other journals and anthologies. Under the Broom Tree is his first formally published book of poetry.  

Bills Of Lading, by Heather Eudy. Born and raised in rural San Diego County, after graduating high school Heather Eudy studied writing in San Francisco by way of Colorado, then completed her MFA in poetry at San Diego State University.  Eudy has held an eclectic assortment of jobs, including construction worker, cross-country car courier, and odd jobs in Mexico—where she discovered her vocation to teaching.  She has since found a home as English professor at Southwestern College. Eudy's work has been featured in several anthologies, including Hunger and Thirst: Food Literature (ed. Nancy Cary, CityWorks Press 2008).

The Book of Ugly Things, by Cali Linfor. Cali Linfor was raised mainly in Riverside, California, but she relocated to Los Angeles to complete her Bachelor of Arts in English, and then San Diego to obtain her M.F.A. in poetry from SDSU, where she now lectures in rhetoric, composition and writing.  Linfor served for sixteen years as poetry editor of Epicenter Literary Magazine; she has published poems, articles, and short stories in The Beloit Poetry Review, Manzanita Review, Ekphrasis, and others. Her first book, A Book of Ugly Things, appears in Lantern Tree: Four Books of Poems. 

While Linfor’s academic research emphasizes educational equity, her literary work explores “the commonalities of repulsion and the habit of making beautiful what is not” (lanterntree.us). Linfor was born with a genetic disability that has influenced her examinations of beauty and ugliness, and her encounters with reading and writing as a child were affected by dyslexia.  Linfor now resides in the Mission Trails area near the San Diego River. Linfor is a member of the Mayday Poetry Workgroup.  The Book of Ugly Things is her first published book of poetry.

Pacific Standard Time, by Sabrina Youmans. San Diego born Sabrina Youmans credits her minister father and city-staffer mother, both of whom grew up during the Great Depression, for her own work ethic and respect for education. Youmans began her career as a journalist, and then transitioned into the job of educator. Youmans’s training was as a language poet; in fact, she studied under Pulitzer poet Rae Armantrout.  By 1999, she completed her Master’s of Fine Art in Poetry at SDSU and has since continued to teach writing and poetry. For the past ten years, Youmans has worked with student athletes as a learning specialist at UCLA.  Her poems have appeared in various literary journals.