Commemorations
Ventura County Poetry Project honors our literary community in various ways: Our Literary Treasures are elders who have served the community for decades. We also present a Communitarian Award, gather Laureates together for occasional advice and Lollapalooza, produce honorary publications, and partner with artists and other groups.
Treasures
Communitarian Award
Laureate Lollapalooza
Books: Was I Asleep, Psalms of Cinder & Silt, Defying Gravity
Poetry Utility Box, w/ artist/poet Peg Quinn
Workshops and Festivals
Venture County Poetry Project workshops and festivals are generative writing opportunities for student and adult writers. They have taken place during Poetry Walks in the Santa Susana mountains, at Cal Lutheran University in ceramics classes as well as a spontaneous multi-author poetry event at the Farm to Table Banquet, in art galleries in response to the art, and, under the direction of Sandra Hunter, a multi-strand one-day Literary Festival sited in 2020 at Oxnard High School to better reach underserved students.
What we’re working on right now:
Publishers on Writing is a new workshop series that will bring together editors and publishers of literary journals with interested writers. Our next “Dear America” production, Telling the World We Lived, will feature senior writers using poetry as a vehicle to relate a defining moment in their lives specifically linked to a time and place in the past. They will work with a youth poetry group to share poems and talk. Youth poets will also be working on pieces that illuminate their own defining moments.