To have Elizabeth Willis reading on the same bill as Steve McCaffery redefines the term "embarrassment of riches." Willis' poetry is somber, fragmentary, full of pain and cultural forgetting, and yet shimmers with flashes of great wit and beauty. She is the author of two books of poems- Second Law (1993), and The Human Abstract (1995) along with the chapbooks A/O (1991) and A Maiden (1993). Her work has been anthologized in the Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative North American Poetry, and she won the National Poetry Series in 1994. She holds a Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY at Buffalo, and now-hurray!-lives in Santa Cruz.

April 19, 1997