Join us for drinks and appetizers at PorchLight Literary Arts Center. Walk through our space and find out about all we do: residencies, our new co-op model, Misfit Master Classes, the PromptPress Reading Room, and our free programming.

Nancy Miller Gomez grew up in Kansas, but currently lives in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, Shenandoah, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and her chapbook, Punishment, was published as part of

NOTE: This event is sold out. Natalie Goldberg has influenced generations of aspiring creative writers with books like Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind. Her books offer  down-to-earth guidance for developing a meaningful writing practice in the real world, however different that is for each of us. In her new book, Writing on Empty,

Something Small of How to See a River interrogates the idea of narrative. Who gets to tell a story and what does it mean when the official story, the story told by the governor, the police, or the local media, is a fundamentally dishonest one? The poems collected here meditate on failure: how systems fail us