Featuring
- Florencia Ramirez (writer)
- Tess Taylor (poet)
- Alexander Elliott Miller (guitar)
- Patricia Cloud (flute)
Program
Florencia Ramirez will take us on a journey to small scale farms around the United States to piece together an inspiring narrative to save and protect water resources for the present and future.
Tess Taylor will read poems that explore what it means to write place, especially in a time of deracination. Her book Work & Days deals with the pleasures and challenges of a year spent small scale farming in Western Massachusetts, and new poems from her current manuscript Rift Zone explore the oft en strange geologic perch of California, where she grew up and now lives again.
- Water Music (1960) by Toru Takemitsu
- Towards the Sea (1981) Toru Takemitsu
- 1. The night
- 2. Moby Dick
- 3. Cape Cod
- Itinerant (dedicated to Isamu Noguchi 1989) by Toru Takemitsu
- To………Oblivion (2017) by Alexander Elliot Miller (Historic Landmarks Around Los Angeles)
- V. Zanja Madre
- Reverie (arranged for flute and guitar) by Claude Debussy
Red Hen Press’s participation in this event is made possible in part by the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Aff airs Division.
About the Artists
Florencia Ramirez
is a trained researcher at the University of Chicago’s School of Public Policy. She won the sixth Gift of Freedom Creative Nonfiction Award from the A Room of Her Own Foundation (AROHO). Her articles appear in Edible Communities Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, among others, and in her popular blog. Florencia has been interviewed by NPR, American Public Media, New York and Bay Area Pacifica Radio, and KTLA Morning News. She lives in Oxnard, California, an agricultural town on the Pacific coast that smells of celery, strawberries, and fertilizers with her husband and three young children. florenciaramirez.com
Tess Taylor
Tess Taylor’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book, Work & Days, was called “our moment’s Georgic” by critic Stephanie Burt and named one of the 10 best books of poetry of 2016 by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other publications. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor was recently a Distinguished Fulbright US Scholar to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University in Belfast. This spring she is Anne Spencer Poet-in-Residence at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Alexander Elliott Miller
Alexander Elliott Miller is a composer and guitarist in Southern California; he has created works for guitar, chamber ensembles, multimedia presentations and electronics which have been described as “wild…unearthly…lyrical…a voice worth listening to” (San Francisco Classical Voice) and “deceptively laid back…inventive….unconventional” (LA Times). As a guitarist, he was a member of the What’s Next? Ensemble, and frequently performs his own compositions. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, by Grammy nominated musicians including Vicki Ray and Tony Arnold, and by ensembles such as HOCKET, Juventas New Music Ensemble, Earplay and the Boston New Music Initiative. Miller is on the faculty of California State University Long Beach and Chapman University. He holds degrees from USC, the Eastman School of Music and the University of Colorado at Boulder. alexanderemiller.com
Patricia Cloud
Renowned flutist Patricia Cloud has played throughout her native Southern California and all over the world with ensembles ranging from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to the Persian singer, Dariush. She received her training at USC’s Thornton School of Music where she was named “Most Outstanding Graduate.” The versatile Ms. Cloud has played numerous Broadway shows at the Ahmanson Theater, but is equally at home in the recording studio with the likes of Annie Lennox and Stevie Wonder or giving solo recitals and playing concerti. She has taught at USC, and is currently on the faculty at UC Irvine’s Claire Trevor School of the Arts.
