Spring Catamaran Launch Party

Catamaran Literary Reader, founded in 2012, is located in the Tannery Art Center in Santa Cruz. This beautiful, high quality, full-color quarterly magazine features fine art, poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction. The contributing artists and writers come from California and beyond. It has a loyal following of readers who celebrate culture, arts, books, and museums. Catamaran also features a poetry prize for West Coast poets and an annual Catamaran Writing Conference during the summer. Visit the website at www.catamaranliteraryreader.com.

Mechanics' Institute is delighted to collaborate with Catamaran to celebrate their Spring 2024 edition. Featured writers include Andrew Fague, Charles Hood, Amethyst Loscocco, Lou Mathews, Claire Oshetsky, Alison Turner, and Todd Turnidge, who will read from their works.

Join us for a reception at 6:00 pm, with readings beginning at 6:30 pm until 7:30 pm, followed by a tour of Mechanics' Institute for interested guests. Complimentary wine from Santa Cruz wineries will be served.

Magazines will be sold onsite.

Meet the Authors

Andrew Fague’s poems are in Catamaran Literary Reader, Windfall, Chicago Quarterly Review, Salt, Xinachtli Journal, Porter Gulch Review, phren-Z, and elsewhere. For twenty years, he has taught writing, literature, mythology, and poetry workshops at various colleges on the West Coast, currently at Cabrillo College. He lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Charles Hood is a frequent contributor to Catamaran. His most recent book is Nocturnalia: Nature in the Western Night. He has studied birds and natural history from the Amazon to Tibet, and has seen more than five thousand species of birds in the wild. A widely published poet, he has received numerous fellowships and writing awards and is the author of numerous books, including . Other Heyday titles include field guides to mammals and birds, and for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County he was the lead author and photographer for the book Wild LA.

Amethyst Loscocco writes both fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Catamaran Literary Reader, The Science Writer, Sundial Magazine, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2024 Page Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She has an MA in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She lives in Oakland, California.

Lou Mathews is the author of the novels L.A. Breakdown, an L.A. Times Best Book, and Shaky Town, long-listed for 2022 Tournament-of-books, both from Tiger Van Books. He has received a Pushcart Prize, A Katherine Anne Porter Prize and California Arts Commission and NEA Fellowships in Fiction. He has taught in UCLA Extension’s acclaimed creative writing program since 1989. His short stories have been published in ZZZYVYA, New England Review, Short Story, Black Clock, and more than forty other literary magazines. “Quality of Life” is from his new novel Hollywoodski, due out in January 2025.

Claire Oshetsky’s novel Chouette (Ecco, 2021) was longlisted for the 2022 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Their latest novel is Poor Deer, published in January 2024 by Ecco. Oshetsky lives in Santa Cruz, California.

Alison Turner lives with her husband under the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles, California. She received a JD from the UCLA School of Law and, during the years of a busy appellate practice, reserved the hours of 5 to 7 in the morning for reading and writing poems. Her first full length collection is The Second Split Between, winner of the 2021 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. Her poems have been published in Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Hudson Review, San Pedro River Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies.

Todd Turnidge is a writer, computer programmer, and parent living in Northern California. He recently received his MFA from Pacific University, where he was a recipient of the Marvin Bell Endowed Scholarship in Poetry. His poems are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review and Copper Nickel.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Institute