Wanda Coleman and Brenda Coultas

Wanda Coleman

Born in 1946, Wanda Coleman grew up in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. She is the author of Bathwater Wine (Black Sparrow Press, 1998), winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. A former medical secretary, magazine editor, journalist and scriptwriter, Coleman has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation for her poetry. She is known as the “unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles.” The Nation writes: “Coleman’s poems are an act of liberation, meant to be experienced as something almost physical, like a punch or a whipping...She wants her language to express anger, to incite anger and to shake all those who read it out of their complacency.”

Brenda Coultas

An Indiana native who has worked as a carny, park ranger, waitress in a disco ballroom and the second woman welder in Firestone Steele’s history, Brenda Coultas lives in New York. She was a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in 2005. Her poetry has been published in Brooklyn Rail, Encyclopedia, Conjunctions and many other journals. She is the author of A Handmade Museum, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and The Marvelous Bones of Time.