Ventura County Poetry Festival: Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Tim Seibles

Join us for the 2024 Ventura County Poetry Festival and stay tuned for more festival updates!

Saturday Headliners: Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Tim Seibles

Appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara in 2019, Laure-Anne Bosselaar grew up in Belgium where she worked for Belgian and Luxembourg Radio and Television. She studied Acting and Elocution from the Brussels Conservatory and an M.F.A. in Theater Arts from the Institut National des Arts des Spectacles (National Institute for the Performing Arts) in Brussels, Belgium. She taught French Poetry at the International School of Brussels.

A graduate from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she taught poetry workshops for the Writers in the Schools program in Colorado, and co-directed the Aspen Writers’ Conference from 1989 to 1992. Among other publications, her poems were published in Ploughshares, Ohio Review, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, AGNI, and The Washington Post as well as in numerous anthologies. Garrison Keillor has read four of her poems on N.P.R’s The Writer’s Almanac. She is also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Her first collection in English, The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, was published by BOA Editions. Her second book of poems, Small Gods of Grief, also published by BOA Editions, won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, Laure-Anne’s third poetry collection was selected as an ALA Notable Book, was published by Ausable Books and can be ordered from Copper Canyon Press.

She taught poetry workshops at Emerson College, at the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College, and at many conferences such as Catskill Poetry Workshops, the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Frost Place Poetry Festival. She was awarded a Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, and was a Writer in Residence at The Vermont Studio Center and at Hamilton College, New York. She was the McEver Chair for Visiting Writers at Georgia Tech University in Atlanta, Georgia. With her husband, poet Kurt Brown, Laure-Anne co-edited Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars. She is the editor of Outsiders: Poems about Rebels, Exiles and Renegades as well as Urban Nature: Poems about Wildlife in the City, all from Milkweed Editions. Her latest anthology, Never Before: Poems about First Experiences was published by Four Way Books. She is currently translating American poetry into French and Flemish poetry into English. In 2006, the Field Translation Series from Oberlin College Press published The Plural of Happiness, Selected Poems by Herman de Coninck, translated from the Dutch by Laure-Anne and Kurt Brown. She taught at the College of Creative Studies at UCSB, and is part of the Founding Faculty of the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College in Boston, MA. She teaches at the SunJune Literary Collaborative.

Tim Seibles was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1955. He received a BA from Southern Methodist University in 1977, after which he taught English at the high school level for ten years. He received an MFA from Vermont College in 1990.

Seibles is the author of several poetry collections, including One Turn Around the Sun (Etruscan Press, 2017), Fast Animal (Etruscan Press, 2012), a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award; Buffalo Head Solos (Cleveland State University Press, 2004); and Body Moves (Corona Press, 1988).

In the citation for the 2012 National Book Awards, the National Book Foundation notes, “Tim Seibles’ work is proof: the new American poet can’t just speak one language. In his new book, he fuses our street corners’ quickest wit, our violent vernaculars, and our numerous tongues of longing and love.”

In 2016 Seibles was selected as the poet laureate of Virginia. He has also received the Open Voice Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.