Mt. San Antonio College
Creative Writing Retreat

Tony Barnstone

Tony Barnstone is a professor of English at Whittier College. Born in Middleton, Connecticut, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, Barnstone lived for years in Greece, Spain, Kenya, and China before taking his Masters in English and Creative Writing and PhD in English Literature at UC Berkeley. His poetry, translations, essays on poetics, and fiction have appeared in dozens of American literary journals from APR to Agni. He has won fellowships and poetry awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the Pushcart Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. In 2006 he won the Benjamin Saltman Award for Poetry for his manuscript, The Golem of Los Angeles. His other books include Tongue of War, Impure, Naked Magic, and Sad Jazz: Sonnets.

Phyllis Gebauer

Phyllis Gebauer is currently an instructor for the Writers’ Program at the UCLA Extension, where she has taught since 1989. She was named “Outstanding Teacher in Creative Writing” for the UCLA Extension in 1992. She earned her B.S. in Spanish from Northwestern University and her Master’s degree in Spanish at the University of Houston.

Her published works include The Pagan Blessing (1979), now adapted into a screenplay, and Hot Widow (2008). Her work has been published in Modern Maturity, Concept 15, The Iowa English Bulletin, PEN Yearbook, and Sight Lines. She is now working on the first of a series of comic mysteries featuring a male and a female senior sleuths.

Suzanne Lummis

Suzanne Lummis is the present and founding Director of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival (LAPF), which now produces a festival every second year, and literary coordinator of the Arroyo Arts Collective Project, “Poetry in the Windows” in Highland Park, CA. She was principal editor of Grand Passion: The Poetry of Los Angeles and Beyond, a publication of the LAPF organization.

Individual poems, including two from her relative youth, appear in the Everyman’s Library anthology Poems of the American West. More work is featured in How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets, Poetry as Purpose: Poetry of the Western States, and California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present. In Danger, her most recent collection, was selected for the California Poetry Series, Roundhouse Press/Heyday Books. In the Web realm, Lummis’ poems can be found at www.cortlandreview.com Issue 16, www.thedrunkenboat.com Spring 2001, www.pshares.org Winter 98-99, and www.caffeinedestiny.com.