Zara Raab and Judy Wells
Monday, January 23 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street at Crossroads for the Arts
Host: Tim Kahl
Zara Raab grew up along the North Coast of California. She attended Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she lived in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she freelanced as an editor and writer, before returninto the West Coast to raise a family. Her grandparents’ grandparents’ settled in Humboldt and Mendocino counties in the 19th century, where they farmed, raised cattle and harvested tan oak for leather. Both her parents attended one-room schools; the one in Branscomb still stands. Early California is a subject of Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life informs her earlier work, The Book of Gretel.
On Zara Raab’s Swimming the Eel
“With abundant detail and in many voices the poet rounds out family history with sweetness, humor and presence, frequently moving back and forth from one era to another. In this way we see the family lines as they gather along the Eel, and disperse. . . . Zara Raab has long entranced us with glimpses into her ancestral life. Now we have the wonder of it in Swimming the Eel. We are grateful.”
––Cleo Griffith, editor, Song of the San Joaquin
“Swimming the Eel is a moving and impressive work of art. Its family history feels both intimate and mythic in its fresh iteration of a Western American archetype. [With] a combination of formal coherence and musical fluency, . . . a beautifully sustained sequence of poems.”
––Stephen Kessler, author, The Tolstoy of the Zulus
“This poetic chronology grips and blesses in a way that no history could, telling the story of the American West through family eyes, beginning with an “artless girl who kept a clean house over a green hill,” who is swept toward her future by life’s inevitable “waterfall of loss.” Charm and efficacy yield a light touch; yet the words speak of deep longing . . . amid the “pantaloons of soil along the river rock.”
––Cathy Luchetti, author of Women of the West
“Who’ll join me…as the winter seance starts, wind rattling the pots?” Zara Raab’s compelling dream of history, and the painful waking from it, merges inner life with outer world in these exhilarating lyrics of lost lifetimes in an outback corner of Northern California. A brew of wildness and domesticity. . . its pleasures are many. . . “
––Beverly Burch, author of Sweet to Burn
JUDY WELLS has published ten collections and chapbooks of poetry: I Dream of Circus Characters: A Berkeley Chronicle (Beatitude Press, 2010), Little Lulu Talks with Vincent Van Gogh (Malthus Press, 2007), Call Home (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2005), Everything Irish (Scarlet Tanager Books, 1999), The Calling: Twentieth Century Women Artists (Mother’s Hen, 1994), The Part-time Teacher (Rainy Day Women Press, 1991), Jane, Jane (Hawkeye Press, 1981), Albuquerque Winter (Hawkeye, 1980), Been in Berkeley Too Long (Hawkeye, 1980), and I Have Berkeley, (Hawkeye, 1979).
She has read her poetry in many venues—from the famed bookstore, Shakespeare & Co. in Paris to the famed, now closed Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. She was a featured reader in the Berkeley Poetry Festival, 2006, 2009, and 2011. Journal publications include Feile-Festa, Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review, North Coast Literary Review, 2000: Here’s to Humanity, Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology, The Walrus, Howling Dog, The Kerf, Colere, Rattlesnake, and forthcoming in California Quarterly and Levure Litteraire.
She received her B.A. in French from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. Judy is also co-editor of The Berkeley Literary Women’s Revolution: Essays from Marsha’s Salon, McFarland, 2005, a chronicle of the founding of Women’s Studies in the Comparative Literature Department at UC Berkeley in the 1970s. Her essays have also appeared in Travelers’ Tales Ireland and several editions of The Borzoi College Reader.
Judy taught writing and literature at various Bay Area colleges before a career as an Academic Counselor for adults in the School of Extended Education at Saint Mary’s College of California, and as a faculty member of the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Saint Mary’s. She is now devoted full-time to her poetry.
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