Kirsten Ogden
Photo by Mathew Digges, 2011.
Writer, Director, Performer, and Poet, Kirsten Ogden has been a member of California Poets in the Schools (CPITS) since 1998, serving as a poet-teacher, a teacher-trainer, a curriculum developer, and area coordinator. Kirsten’s work has appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including anderbo.com, Louisiana Literature, Poets for Living Waters, The Kenyon Review Blog, Teaching Tolerance Magazine, English Journal, Phoebe, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Slipstream, Fringe, and elsewhere. Her plays and poems have been performed on university and community stages in California, Hawai’i', Louisiana, and Alaska. Kirsten serves as Blog Editor for The Blog @ Cpits and is an occasional contributing blogger to Kenyon Review Online. She is currently a reader for the Georgia Press Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Prize, and will be a visiting teacher this summer in the Young Writers at Kenyon program sponsored by the Kenyon Review. Sign up for her free, daily email on writing by visiting her website at EatThePaper.com
Marissa Bell Toffoli. Photo by Todd Toffoli (2009).
Marissa Bell Toffoli
At home in Berkeley, California, Marissa works as an editor for UC Berkeley, and she is a poet teacher with California Poets in the Schools. An English major who went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Writing, she is as beholden to words as she is to breath. Learn more about Marissa and become familiar with her writing at google.com/profiles/marissatoffoli. Read her interviews with writers at Words With Writers.
Brandon Cesmat
Brandon Cesmat performs his work.
Brandon Cesmat is the author of When Pigs Fall In Love and other stories, Light in All Directions, and Driven Into Shade. Cesmat has been a poet-teacher for California Poet in the Schools (CPITS) since 1993. He visits classrooms and conducts workshops on poetry writing and performance, including workshops preparing high school students for Poetry Out Loud. He teaches for CSU San Marcos and Perelandra College.
Laura E. Davis reading at the 2012 AWP Conference in Chicago
Laura E. Davis
Laura E. Davis is the author of Braiding the Storm, a poetry chapbookforthcoming from Finishing Line Press (2012). A Pennsylvania native, Laura has been involved with California Poets in the Schools since 2011. Laura also teaches children the art of poetry translation for Poetry Inside Out in San Francisco, where she is also the Poetry Out Loud County Coordinator. She is the Founding Editor of Weave Magazine and often writes about teaching poetry to children, among other things, on her blog, Dear Outer Space.
The CPITS BLOG is affiliated with the California Poets in the Schools organization, but the ideas and information included in the blog posts are entirely those of the individual bloggers and do not reflect the opinions as a whole of the CPITS Organization.
INTERESTED IN WRITING FOR THE CPITS BLOG?
There’s no fortune in it for you, but there could be fame! Current CPITS Poet-Teachers, please contact Kirsten Ogden by emailing info@cpits.org
