Poetry Night Reading Series: Bill Mohr and Rhony Bhopla

The Poetry Night Reading Series is excited to feature poets Bill Mohr and Rhony Bhopla at 7 PM on Thursday, November 16th, 2023, on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis. 

Poet, editor, publisher, scholar, and critic, Bill Mohr is widely recognized as one of the leading literary activists in Southern California in the past 40 years. His writing has been featured in over a dozen anthologies, and translated into Spanish, Japanese, Italian, and Croatian. His work as editor/publisher of Momentum Press received four awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his honors include being a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and fellowships at the Huntington Library. His highly praised account of West Coast poetry, Holdouts: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948-1992, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011. He is a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach.

The poems, prose poems and creative prose of Bill Mohr have appeared in dozens of magazines in the past 40 years. His volumes of poetry include Hidden Proofs (1982); Penetralia (1984); Bittersweet Kaleidoscope (2006); and a bilingual volume published in Mexico, Pruebas Ocultas (Bonobos Editores, 2015). In October, 2018, What Books/Glass Table Collective published a new collection of his poems, The Headwaters of Nirvana / Los Manantiales del Nirvana.

Bill Mohr has a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego and is currently a professor in the Department of English at California State University, Long Beach, where he has taught since 2006. 

Rhony Bhopla is a poet, emerging book critic, and visual artist. Her poems have appeared in PRISM International, The Hopper, Notre Dame Review, Cherry Moon: Emerging Voices from the Asian Diaspora, and The Good Life Review. Her book reviews can be read in Northwest Review and Harvard Review. Rhapsody, a series of acrylic and collage artworks, was on show in the Promise Me a Rose Garden exhibit at the Kennedy Gallery in Sacramento in 2023. Her artworks are a regular feature of the Big Names Small Art (BNSA) art auction for the Crocker Art Museum.

Bhopla was awarded the Kwame Dawes Mapmakers Scholarship along with a teaching assistantship at Pacific University, and hosted two Mapmakers Alumni Institute webinars featuring international poets Shivanee Ramlochan, Rajiv Mohabir, and Sudeep Sen on the topic of Global Perspectives: Ecopoetics and Eco-writing. She is a 2019 Rooted and Written Fellow and received a 2023 Anaphora Arts Fellowship for the Emerging Critics Program. Bhopla serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors for Women’s Wisdom Art in Sacramento, and works as a science field educator with Sierra Nevada Journeys. Bhopla holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University which focuses on Bhāvika, the confluence of poetry with image. When she is not writing or painting, Rhony enjoys cooking, gardening, and hiking.

This event will take place on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery (521 1st Street) at 7 PM on Thursday, November 16th, 2023. An open mic will follow the featured performers. Open mic performances will be limited to three minutes or two items, whichever is shorter. As Robert Southey says, “Be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams – the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.” The open mic list typically fills by 6:50 PM, so please arrive early if you would like to perform something during the 8 o’clock hour. Attendees who request to be added to the list after 7 PM will be invited to try again at a subsequent event.

Find the Facebook event for this delightful evening of poetry at https://www.facebook.com/events/245117561613123.

From Steve Martin to Jimmy Kimmel to Dr. Andy’s mom, Covid test positivity is up in California. Attendees are encouraged to mask up when inside the John Natsoulas Gallery.

The Poetry Night Reading Series, taking place on first and third Thursdays of the month at 7 PM, is generously supported by the people and poets of the Sacramento Valley, by John Natsoulas, and by Thea and the other members of the staff at the John Natsoulas Gallery. Your host will be Dr. Andy Jones, the poet laureate emeritus of the City of Davis. This event is made possible by Katerina Hanks, producer of The Poetry Night Reading Series, with support from Helaina Flores and Cami Rothmuller.

Find out more about the Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com.