Sonoma County Literary Update

Dear Literary Folk,

Thank You to Dave Seter and Congratulations to Our New Poet Laureate!
I invite you all to click on the Poet Laureate News page and read Dave Seter’s thoughtful and moving farewell message as our outgoing laureate. Dave has been a resourceful, gracious, and inventive literary ambassador, offering free workshops and hosting readings across the county. He’s also been as close to omnipresent as a person can be, short of cloning. Without fanfare or spotlight, Dave has been a presence (and sometimes a participant) at open mics, spoken word slams, the Favorite Poem reading, and the Petaluma Library branch opening, and so much more, drawing together readers and writers of all ages, levels of experience, and aesthetic persuasion, nurturing and celebrating our rich literary community.

As a past poet laureate, I serve on the PL Selection Committee, along with an amazing team representing SSU, SRJC, the Sonoma County Library, the county’s supervisory districts, and all the past laureates, including Dave. We were blessed to have an incredible group of nominees from which we chose five finalists. This is really such a collegial committee. We listen respectfully to one another as we discuss the strengths of each finalist. Then we come to a consensus decision. Believe me, it’s not easy, and yet we know that each nominee has such vision and talent, that Sonoma County will thrive as a literary community because of what they have already given and continue to share.

And now, I’m so very pleased to announce that our new Poet Laureate for Sonoma County 2026-2028 is Claire Drucker. Claire Drucker is a Jewish lesbian mom, educational consultant, poet, dancer and identical twin. Her first book-length collection of poems, The Life You Gave Me, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Books. Her chapbook, The Fluid Body, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Claire’s poems have also been published in numerous journals, including CA Quarterly, Jewish Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, Epiphany, Puerto del Sol, The Freedom of New Beginnings, and Women Artists Datebook, to name a few. She was an English professor at Santa Rosa Junior College for 27 years, where she taught creative writing, composition and critical thinking. For 13 years, Claire was a poet-teacher with CA Poets in the Schools, working with elementary-age children in the public school system. She received her BA in English Literature from The University of Virginia and her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University. She is currently the poetry curator for The Sitting Room, a community library dedicated to women’s literature with over 7,000 titles. Recently, Claire has been working on a collection of prose poems in response to the hundreds of words that have been erased since this regime came to power. She lives in Sebastopol. 

Claire’s project, titled “Voices Across Time: An Intergenerational Poetry Project,” proposes pairing high school students with elders in Sonoma County to create collaborative poems drawn from oral history interviews. This project grows from Claire’s lifelong commitment to honoring individual stories and amplifying often unheard voices.

The Sebastopol Center for the Arts, along with the Poet Laureate Selection Committee, invites the public to a reception on Sunday, July 12, 2026, at 2 PM. We’ll be honoring our outgoing Poet Laureate Dave Seter and our new Laureate Claire Drucker. Register for the reception on the SebArts website at sebarts.org/literary-arts.

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When Voices Rise: Songs and Poems of Resistance
On Friday, July 17, 6-8 PM, The Sebastopol Center for the Arts will host an extraordinary evening of poetry and music, in conjunction with the Resist and Persist Exhibition in the art gallery. “When Voices Rise” is hosted by poet Shawna Swetech and features the powerful words of local poets, songs from the Harmonia Choir, and an open mic for you to share your poetry on the themes of resistance, hope, or protest. This special evening event will be a celebration of personal and collective voices.

Featured poets include Dave Seter, Kim D. Hester Williams, Maya Khosla, Gwynn O’Gara, Shawna Swetech, Claire Drucker, and Elizabeth Herron. Sign-ups for open mic will be the night of the event. Location: 282 S. High Street, Sebastopol.

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Memorial for Phyllis Meshulam
In March, 2026, Poet Laureate Emerita Phyllis Meshulam passed away. As our Sonoma County Poet Laureate from 2020-2022, Phyllis guided us in her steady way through the shelter-in-place and social distancing of Covid-19. She brought together voices from across the county and beyond in her poet laureate project, the anthology called Freedom of New Beginnings—even as she faced the challenge of her newly diagnosed neurological illness.

Phyllis was a shining light in our literary community, especially her work with young writers in the CalPoets program, the Poetry Out Loud Program, and many events her students participated in, including the Petaluma Poetry Walk and the Poetry of Remembrance Community Reading. She reached diverse communities through her teaching and writing, from residents at Napa State Hospital, veterans, preschoolers, and English language learners. The legacy of her teaching and her poetry is imbued with her passion for justice, sensitivity, and inclusiveness.

Phyllis’s family invites the literary community to join them in a Celebration of Phyllis’s Life, on Sunday, October 18, 2026, 3:00 pm, Sebastopol Center for the Arts. Mark your calendars! Details will be forthcoming in August and September’s post.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1881

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A Sampler from Our Literary Calendar
I’m going to be on a Pacific Northwest road trip July 13-August 3, so I will be missing so many of the cool literary events going on this month. I’ve listed below a few of these delights. Much more on the Calendar page.

If WiFi is available (and the creek don’t rise), I will do my best to send in my August 1st post from the road. I’ll be somewhere between Mount Rainier and Ashland.

Thursday, July 2, 6:00-7:00 p.m. A Reading with Sixteen Rivers Press at Napa Bookmine, 1625 2nd Street, Napa. Poets Lenore Myers, Caroline Miller, and Dane Cervine will read from their books.

Thursday, July 9, 6:00-8:00 p.m. Speakeasy: Poets and Singer/Songwriters. Musicians and poets each do a 20-25 minute set, followed by open mic. Afterwards we mingle for conversation and connection. Featured are poet John Monroe Johnson and musicians Scott Hensel and Lin Harding.

Thursday, July 16, 6:30-8:00 p.m. Copperfield’s Books is honored to welcome Greg Sarris home to Santa Rosa for a preeminent evening celebrating his powerful new novel, The Last Human Bear. Finley Community Center, 2060 W College Ave., Santa Rosa.

Friday, July 24, 7:00 p.m. Copperfield’s Books welcomes author and filmmaker Phil Cousineau to Sebastopol in celebration of his new book The Wisdom of the Odyssey: Twenty-Four Life Lessons from Homer’s Epic.

Sunday-Friday, July 26-31. Napa Valley Writer’s Conference. Readings, craft workshops, and community classes are open to the public. See napawritersconference.org/public-events

Thursday, July 30, 5:00-7:00 p.m. A Tribute to French Culture through Poetry and Music at Barrel Proof Lounge, 501 Mendocino Avenue, Santa Rosa. To become a participant, contact Timothy Williams: jaxonspress@gmail.com, 707-321-3852.

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Poem for July
We’re approaching the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, yet so little in our country today evokes a celebration. This poem asks us to face our brutal history, so much of which is being erased even as we speak. Yet this history also reminds us that our ideals have endured and can still lead us out of darkness.

‘Tis of Thee My Country
by William Greenwood

Once upon my being founded country,
‘twas ideals―of liberty, equality―
that made time tick and the world
go round, or so we were taught
and
believe
the history we sing
was peopled by devout small
farmers fleeing persecution.
But once off the boat, folks started
nudge-nudging and push-pushing,
grabbing what was native land.
Tobacco gentlemen down south
outdid their teacher Indians
by using African slave labor,
whip-whipping the men
and ravaging the girls.
Meanwhile founders kept on
living all over indigenous
place names stolen from
tribes granted not a whisper
of a toehold to their homes
in our forefathers’ most
high-minded documents.
This country ultimately fought
entire wars, bloody, grisly
battles in our own backyard
and across surrounding seas.
‘For what?’ we might rightly ask.
The greater good? the many for?
Maybe great shakes for a few.
Happiness? the pursuit thereof?
Once caught, it never stuck around.
Where and wherefore justice then?
The answers we’ve conceived
are woven in the fabric of our lives
and baked into the syntax of our daily bread,
like the children we begot and nurture,
all the loves we cherish to embrace
upon which the stuff of these
now stands
or sooner or later falls.

William Greenwood was born in Arizona and studied at the University of California. After joining the farm workers’ struggle for justice during early unionization, he organized the first agricultural producer-marketing cooperative of Mexican farm workers. This led to a career in development which took him to residencies in Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia, working on agricultural and small business projects.

In the 1970s, he co–founded Green Horse Press with a small group of poets to translate and publish new poetry previously unavailable to English speakers. His publications include the chapbook Into the Center of America (Green Horse Press), Landscape/Cityscape (Word Temple Press) and Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Hope (Blue Light Press). A new book of poems, Aerials and Landings, will be published later this year.

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Send Us Your Poetry/Short Prose Selections
In 2024, I began featuring a different Sonoma County writer at the end of the Literary Update Post. Here’s how to participate.

The theme can be anything you feel is appropriate to the season. I’ve adjusted the subject line, so you won’t feel limited to sending lineated verse. In fact, prose poems, flash fiction, creative nonfiction are all welcome, as long as the piece you send is no more than a page in length.

Send your submission to me at tehret99@comcast.net, with “SCLU Poem/Prose of the Month” in the subject heading.

Send me just one submission, no more than a page (or less). Be patient, as I sometimes have a backlog of poems I’ve selected to publish.

These can be previously published, provided you identify the publishing source. If the piece is not your own, provide the author’s name and source. The author should be a Sonoma County voice, and if contemporary, please ask the author’s permission to submit.

Deadline: You can send the submission any time during the month, but I’ll need to receive your submission a few days before the month’s end to give me time to read, make my choice, and contact the author of the piece selected.

Terry Ehret, co-editor
Sonoma County Literary Update