Meet Pam Davenport
After traveling the world as a child, Pam Davenport settled in the desert, near Phoenix, where she draws inspiration from the landscape. As the poet Kwame Dawes said, “There is a perception that the desert is emptiness, desert is nothing. No, it is the poet’s playground.” Place is important in Pam’s writing. She also writes of women and water, flesh and food, love and coming of age, and she likes to incorporate playfulness into her writing, both poetry and prose.
After decades of teaching college writing and literature classes, Pam finished her MFA at Pacific University where she was fortunate to work with stellar faculty such as Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, and Vievee Francis. Pam leads writing workshops on such topics as “Leaping into Creativity” and is developing a writing and healing program for Mayo Clinic with her friend Sandi Marinella. She is an associate editor at the Four Chambers Literary Journal. Pam’s poems have appeared in The Avalon Literary Review, Snapdragon, Rougarou, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Spilled Milk, Four Chambers, and Bared: An Anthology on Bras and Breasts.
Meet Lin Benedek
Lin Nelson Benedek, a third generation Californian, lives in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains with her husband and son.
She works as a psychotherapist, well-being coach, writing teacher and writing coach, and is a recent graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, where she had the great privilege of studying poetry writing with Kwame Dawes, Dorianne Laux, Vievee Francis, Anna Journey, Sandra Alcosser, David St. John, Joe Millar, Marvin Bell, Ellen Bass, Eduardo Corral and Tyehimba Jess.
She aspires to write generous, big-hearted poetry: Earthy and ethereal; ecstatic and meditative; reverent and irreverent. She aspires to speak from her soul and to speak up for justice; to write about the joys and sorrows that make up our lives.
Lin’s poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies and her book of mainly autobiographical poems, I Was Going To Be A Cowgirl, will be released in November of this year. She is currently revising her own life story memoir. Lin bows to poetry for all it has brought to her life—truth, beauty and treasured friends—and for bringing her home.
