Women in a Golden State

California has always been more than a place. It’s an idea, a horizon, a shimmering promise. From the gold rush to the counterculture, from Berkeley activism to individual revolutions, it has shaped generations of women and given them permission to dream themselves into being. Women in a Golden State gathers the voices of poets over sixty whose lives and language reflect that inheritance: the freedom to speak, to age, to love, to question.

Join anthropologist Cari Borja in conversation with three of these poets: Lucille Lang Day, Maw Shein Win, and Susan Cohen, whose lives trace a landscape of aging as alchemy, of love as resistance, of language as renewal. They reflect on how California has shaped not only their words but also their ways of seeing, and how the history of this state, with all its beauty and friction, continues to write itself through them.

Lucille Lang Day is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections, including Birds of San Pancho and Becoming an Ancestor. The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems will be published by Trio House in 2026. Her work has appeared in more than 200 magazines and anthologies, including The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, River Styx, The Threepenny Review, Scientific American, ZYZZYVA, and Women in a Golden State: California Poets at 60 and Beyond. Her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland–Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. The founder and publisher of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she lives in Oakland.

Maw Shein Win's latest full-length poetry collection, Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024), was shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous collection, Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry, and nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement awardee, and a 2025 Recipient of the Nomadic/San Francisco Foundation Literary Award. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco and in the Low Residency MFA Program at Dominican University.

Susan Cohen is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Throat Singing (2012), A Different Wakeful Animal (2016), and Democracy of Fire (2022). She is also co-author of Normal at Any Cost, Tall Girls, Short Boys, and The Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height, which won awards from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Association of Science Writers. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and have won the Rita Dove Award, Terrain Annual Poetry Prize, Red Wheelbarrow Prize, and a Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, among other honors. She lives in Berkeley.

Lucille, Maw, and Susan will be in conversation with anthropologist, salonniere, and educator Cari Borja, who also serves as Senior Advisor to Alice Waters. Cari is a founding member of Clio’s.

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