Giovanni Singleton

Award-winning poet Giovanni Singleton has been invited to California State University, Los Angeles, as a guest reader and presenter by the University’s English Department and College of Arts and Letters through the Virginia Smith Fund for Poetry and Poetics.

Giovanni Singleton, who received an MFA in creative writing and poetics from The New College of California, is a recipient of a New Langton Bay Area Award for Literature and has been honored as a fellow at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Poetry Workshop and the Hurston/Wright Writers Week Poetry Workshop.
Image of Nocturnes Journal
In 1999, she founded nocturnes editions—publisher of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a critically-acclaimed journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. She has given presentations on writing, editing, graphic design, and publishing at high schools, colleges and conferences, such as the American Literature Association in 2004, Series X: Bay Area Women Publishers in 2002, and the New York Festival of Literary Magazines in 2002.

For five years, she served as a member of the Board of Directors for Small Press Traffic, a literary arts center in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in a number of publications including Chain, Fence, Five Fingers Review, Callaloo, The Breast: An Anthology (Global City Press; New York, 1994), Beyond the Frontier: African American Poets for the Millennium (Black Classics Press; MD, 2002), and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. In 2002, she was a featured guest on NPR’s “Fresh Air” hosted by Michael Krasny. She has taught poetry in the San Francisco Unified School District and at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA.

On Monday, November 22, Giovanni Singleton will offer a creative writing workshop, “The Blues of Things Unseen: Poetry and Blues,” from 8:00 to 9:30 a.m. in King Hall, room B4012. On Monday evening, she will then give a poetry reading at 5 p.m. in the Fine Arts Gallery in the Fine Arts Building, cosponsored by the University Bookstore. A book signing will follow the reading.

On Tuesday, November 23, Singleton will present a lecture on “Scissors, Rock, Paper: Poet as Publisher and Editor” from 1:30 to 3:10 p.m. at the Roybal Center (Salazar Hall C98-99).

For more information, call the Cal State L.A. English Department at (323) 343-4140.

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