We are proud to announce that the Creative Artist Spotlight Speakers for this year’s PAMLA Conference, at the Bahia Resort Hotel in San Diego (November 1-3, 2013), will be the celebrated poets Rae Armantrout and Marilyn Chin.  Armantrout and Chin will read from their poetry and discuss their work with PAMLA members on Friday evening, November 1, 2013.

Recipient of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award 2009 for Versed,and Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (2008), Rae Armantrout is a native Californian whose poems are masterful contradictions; according to Robert Creeley, her poems have “a quiet and enabling signature.” He adds, “I don’t think there’s another poet writing who is so consummate in authority and yet so generous to her readers and company alike.” She has taught writing at UCSD for over two decades. Her poems are telegenically “regional,” filled with bungalows, newscasters and swimming pools yet they ring with an immaterial clarity that quietly subsumes her readers and listeners in a radical and eerily funny vision.  

Armantrout was at the center of the first generation of Language Poets, the group in the US most often credited with introducing poetry to postmodernity.  In addition to Versed (Wesleyan, 2009), Armantrout has published Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007) Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004) and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2001), as well as countless poems anthologized. For more information about Armantrout, go to http://literature.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/rarmantrout.html .

Marilyn Chin is the author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, The Phoenix Gone, and The Terrace Empty. Her newest book of fiction is Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. Her books have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation and others.

Chin is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and The Norton Introduction to Poetry. She was featured in Bill Moyers’ PBS series The Language of Life. Chin has read and taught workshops all over the world. Recently, she taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and was guest poet at universities in Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney and Berlin.  For more information about Chin please go to: http://www.marilynchin.org