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Hi, my name is Karen Gonzalez. I am the new intern at the Ventura County Poetry Project. I am currently working to get my Bachelor’s degree in English at CSU Channel Islands. I love writing, reading, and making music. My favorite poets are Maya Angelou and Anne Sexton. My love for reading started when I was little. My mom would take my siblings and I to the library almost everyday. Even though my mom did not speak fluent English, she tried her best to teach me how to read. Once I got the hang of it, I was able to dive into different stories andRead More →

How Poetry Changed Me by  Gabrielle Costanzo   Reading and writing poetry is very therapeutic to me, in a way that no other medium can do. The expression of emotion in just one poem is so powerful. When I write one, I don’t have to worry about proper sentence structure or all the technical rules, because poetry is open. There is something so relieving after going through a major life event, happy or sad, about putting it on the page. Putting my emotions on a page makes the shapeless and free floating memories and feelings in my head into shapes, into words, into something thatRead More →

  “Pandemic Postscript”, Poetry and more –by Amy Uyematsu on Eastwind – Politics and Culture of Asian Americans   Introduction: I’ve been writing poetry since my involvement in the early Asian American movement of the late 60s.  Japanese-American and Asian-American themes have been important in much of my writing through the decades.  While I also take on many other topics – among some of my favorites, are stones, women, culture – my anger about racism and white supremacy continues to fuel poems.  During the pandemic, that anger has become rage as we’ve witnessed more racist killings of blacks and the global Black Lives Matters protests, and as we AsianRead More →