Santa Barbara Poetry Series Reading with Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon & David Starkey

Santa Barbara Public Library and Santa Barbara Poetry Series invite you to a poetry reading by Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon & David Starkey.

Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon

is a writer, songwriter and educator who is completing a Creative Writing PhD on erasure poetry and forgotten histories at Edith Cowan University. Her work has appeared in Antipodes, Cordite, Meanjin, Writer's Digest and Hippocampus. She has won the Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize (2018) and KSP Poetry Prize (2019). Natalie has taught writing workshops in the US and Australia, judged several poetry prizes and helped run a volunteer poetry reading series, Voicebox. Her debut poetry collection First Blood was released in 2019 to critical acclaim. Her second poetry book, If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears, on motherhood in the wake of the Trump presidency will be released in late 2023 by Life Before Man Books. She currently lives in Fremantle/Walyalup, Australia with her husband, son, and rescue cat Sylvia.

David Starkey

served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate. The Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College, he is currently Co-editor of Anacapa Review and The California Review of Books, and the Publisher and Co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty-five years, he has published eleven full-length collections of poetry with small presses—most recently Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song, winner of the 2021 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Award, Cutting It Loose, and What Just Happened: 210 Haiku Against the Trump Presidency. More than 500 of his poems have appeared in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2022), is in its fourth edition.