Hollie Hardy and Mukta Sambrani

Hollie Hardy

Hollie Hardy’s poems in How to Take a Bullet and Other Survival Poems are important: brave, whimsical and wise. Hardy seeks dialogue with other poets, authors and artists, burying borrowings like precious jewels, skillfully planting Leonard Cohen and Virginia Woolf, Thomas Pynchon and Sylvia Plath. While her use of form is consistent and understated in the less-is-more sort of way, this quieter, almost traditional manner allows Hardy to enhance the reader’s experience of her rich imagery and sensory detail.

Hardy holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from SF State and teaches writing classes at the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute, SF State and Berkeley City College. An active participant in the Bay Area literary scene, Hardy co-hosts the popular reading series Saturday Night Special, an East Bay Open Mic. She’s a founder and core producer for the Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland, co-curator of Litquake’s Flight of Poets and a former editor-in-chief of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review.

Mukta Sambrani

Mukta Sambrani is an India-born poet and educator based in the United States. Her first book of poems, The Woman in this room isn’t lonely, was published by Writer’s Workshop, Calcutta, in 1997. Her second book, Broomrider’s book of the dead, was published by Paperwall Media and Publishing, Mumbai, in 2015. Mukta’s work has appeared in Verse, Em Literary, Cipactli, Fourteen Hills, Hyphen Magazine, Laundry Pen, The Scribbler, Poetry Chain and anthologies such as Bloodaxe book of contemporary Indian poets, 60 Indian poets, We Speak in Changing Languages, The Dance of the Peacock, Suvarnarekha and others. She is the recipient of the 2003 Audre Lorde creative writing award and an honorable mention for the Starcherone prize.