Poetry Night: Lois Jones & William O’Daly

The Poetry Night Reading Series is excited to feature Lois Jones with William O’Daly at 7 PM on Thursday, May 18th, 2023, on the roof of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1^st Street in Davis.

ABOUT 

WILLIAM O’DALY

A resident of the Sierra Nevada foothills of northern California, William O’Daly is a poet, translator, and fiction writer. His published works include eight books of the late and posthumous poetry of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda (Still Another Day, The Separate Rose, Winter Garden, The Sea and the Bells, The Yellow Heart, The Book of Questions, The Hands of Day, and World’s End), and a chapbook of his own poems, The Whale in the Web. O’Daly was a finalist for the 2006 Quill Award in Poetry for Still Another Day and was profiled on NBC’s The Today Show. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, he has worked as a literary and technical editor, a college professor, and an instructional designer; his poems, translations, essays, and reviews have been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. He is a board member of Poets Against War and co-founder of Copper Canyon Press. With co-author Han-ping Chin, he recently completed a historical novel, This Earthly Life, based on the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

LOIS P. JONES

Lois P. Jones is a finalist in the annual Mslexia Poetry Competitionjudged by Helen Mort and will be published in the Spring 2023 issue of Mslexia. She is currently shortlisted for the 2023 Alpine Fellowship which this year takes place in Fjällnäs, Sweden. In 2022 her work was a finalist for the Best Spiritual Literature Award in Poetry from Orison Books. Other honors include a Highly Commended and publication in the 2021 Bridport Poetry Prize Anthology   Her work has longlisted 4X for the National Poetry Competition.

Other honors include the Bristol Poetry Prize judged by Liz Berry, the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a single poem, the Tiferet Poetry Prize and winning finalist for the 2018 Terrain Poetry contest judged by Jane Hirshfield. Jones’ work appears or is forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets – Poem A Day, Poetry Wales, Mslexia, Plume, Guernica Editions, Vallentine Mitchell of London; Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Narrative and others. Her first collection, “Night Ladder” was published by Glass Lyre Press in 2017 and was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award and the Lascaux Poetry Prize for a poetry collection. She is a screening judge for Claremont University’s Kingsley-Tufts Awards. Since 2007 Jones has hosted KPFK’s Poets Café, co-produced the Moonday Poetry Series and acted as poetry editor for Pushcart and Utne prize-winning Kyoto Journal.

In collaboration with filmmaker Jutta Pryor and sound designer Peter Verwimp, her poem La Scapigliata won the 2022 Lyra Bristol Poetry Film Competition.

Lois participated in the 2022 Cheltenham Poetry Festival, the 2018 Houston Poetry Fest, the 2017 Bristol, England Poetry Festival, the 2014 Eyewear Publishing launch at Goodenough College, London, and attended conferences in San Miguel de Allende Mexico from 2005 to 2010 as well as Languedoc Rousseau, France with Pascale Petit in 2012.

Her literary works have been translated to Korean for Miju Poetry and Poetics by the Korean Poets Society of America (2019) as well as Chinese for Mirrors and Windows published by Guernica Editions. Other work has been included in Arabic for the Publisher Weekly, Arabic Edition “Al-Nasher Al-Usboei” magazine in 2015.