Deborah Tobola and Kindred Spirits Reading
Saturday, June 29
They will read 15 poems.
Tobola joined the union in 2021 while providing end-of-life care for her mother, Joanne. While caring for her mother, she was diagnosed with advanced-stage ovarian cancer. Now she is receiving end-of-life care from her partner, Gene Saint-Amand.
The reading includes poems from her chapbook Pas de Deux, which examines she and her mother’s parallel journeys. Kindred spirit readers are: Stacey Averkieff, Elizabeth Buckner, Anet Carlin, Tiana-Lei Flora, Nancy Goldman, Tish Harris, Judith Hathaway, Margaret Lange,
Elissa Rabellino and Cynthia Semel.
Deborah Tobola is a poet, memoirist, playwright and co-author of a children’s book. Her work has earned four Pushcart Prize nominations, three Academy of American Poets awards and a Children’s Choice Book Award. Her award-winning memoir, Hummingbird in Underworld: Teaching in a Men’s Prison (She Writes Press, 2019), received positive reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Tobola spent more than 30 years working as prison arts instructor, teaching creative writing and theatre. She founded Poetic Justice Project, the country’s first theatre company for formerly incarcerated people, in Santa Maria in 2009.
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