New American Writing Release Party and Readings

Celebrate the release of Issue 43, with special readings from Amy de Rouvray, Ha Kiet Chau, Kit Robinson, Stephen Ratliffe, and Cintia Santana. This program is sponsored by Mechanics’ Institute member and poet Carl Landauer. 

Founded in 1986, New American Writing is a literary magazine emphasizing contemporary American poetry.  Edited by Paul Hoover, it appears once a year in early June. The magazine is distinctive for publishing a range of innovative writing.

Contributors have frequently been included in the annual anthology, The Best American Poetry (Scribners), edited by poet and critic David Lehman and a distinguished guest editor. Work from the magazine has also appeared in the distinguished Pushcart Anthology. In l988 the magazine was named one of the nation's ten outstanding literary magazines by the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines.

Magazines will be sold onsite. 

About the Speakers

Amy de Rouvray is a French-American poet, with an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared, among others, in North American Review and New American Writing, and was finalist for the Kenyon Review Poetry Contest. 

Ha Kiet Chau is a Chinese-Vietnamese American writer and the author of the poetry collection, Eleven Miles to June (Green Writers Press, 2021). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and is a recipient of scholarships from UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, The Sundress Academy for the Arts, and The Seventh Wave. Recent poems have appeared in North American Review, Ploughshares, NELLE, South Carolina Review, and The Margins.

Kit Robinson is the author of over 20 books of poetry, including Tunes & Tens (Roof, 2025), Quarantine (Lavendar Ink, 2022), and Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019).  With Lyn Hejinian, he produced In the American Tree: New Writing by Poets, a weekly Bay Area radio show of interviews and readings.  His papers are collected by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stephen Ratcliffe was born in Boston and has lived for most of his life in the Bay Area. In 1999, he embarked upon daily writing a practice that has generated thousand of pages. All typed in Courier font, the poems are detailed records of perception: tracking landscape, the experience of physical space, and the process of looking and thinking.  His published works include Portraits & Repetition (2002), REAL (2007), Cloud/Ridge (2011), among many others.  Publisher of Avenue B poetry books, he lives in Bolinas and surfs every morning before setting upon his daily writing.

Cintia Santana lives in the Bay Area on unceded Muwekma Ohlone land. The recipient of fellowships from Djerassi and CantoMundo, she’s the author of The Disordered Alphabet (Four Way Books, 2023).  She teaches fiction and poetry workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation courses at Stanford University.