Moderator, Perie Longo, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, 2007-2009, has published 4 books of poetry, the latest Baggage Claim (2014) and poems in numerous literary journals. This June will be her 40th year teaching poetry at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. She’s thrilled and awed to be still poeting and standing.

Melinda Palacio, current Santa Barbara Poet Laureate, is an award-winning writer. From South Central LA, she holds 2 degrees in Comparative Literature. A 2007 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow and a 2009 poetry alum of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, she published Bird Forgiveness in 2018.

David Starkey, Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate, Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at SBCC, and the Publisher/Co-editor of Gunpowder Press, published 11 full length collections of poetry and more than 500 poems in literary journals. His novel Poor Ghost was released in March 2024.

Chryss Yost is a Santa Barbara Poet Laureate who served from 2013-2015. She was awarded the 2013 Patricia Dobler Poetry Prize and other honors, including Pushcart Prize nominations. She’s co-editor of Gunpowder Press. Her collection Mouth & Fruit was published 2014, and her poems have been included in the most popular poetry textbooks in the country and widely anthologized elsewhere.

Enid Osborn Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara 2017-2019, published When the Big Wind Comes, set in New Mexico. A Pushcart nominee, her work appears in regional California and Southwest journals. She has a series of themed chapbooks, and she co-edited A Bird Black as the Sun / California Poets on Crows & Ravens in 2011.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar Santa Barbara’s Poet Laureate 2019-2021, is author of 6 collections of poems and is the recipient of a Pushcart. She taught at Emerson, Sarah Lawrence, UCSB, and is part of the faculty at the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing. Lately: New and Selected Poems was published January 2024.

Emma Trelles Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2021-2023, received an Established Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She was named a Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets. Daughter of Cuban immigrants, she’s author of Tropicalia, winner of the Andrés Montoya Prize.

Paul Willis, Santa Barbara Poet Laureate 2011-2013 is an emeritus professor of English at Westmont College. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he’s been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac and nominated five times for a Pushcart Prize. His YA Elizabethan time-travel novel, All in a Garden Green, was released in 2020.

To everyone who has attended the Santa Barbara Writers Conference and are now part of our tribe of scribes, here is the first post of the audio from the 2024 conference.

For those of you who have recently discovered the conference and are considering attending, we will be posting the audio periodically so you can get a sense of this amazing week long experience which has been going for over fifty years now.

This first post from the 2024 conference is the Orientation and Welcome which will give you a sense of the conference along with tidbits that will help you get the most from the conference.

We are looking forward to 2025!

Author Matthew Pallamary discussed shamanic practices and ceremonies in the jungle, including the use of psychedelic plant medicines like ayahuasca. He detailed a 10-day program he does in the jungle that involves a cleansing diet and various visionary plants. "Your perception gets more refined. It gets very clear. You start having telepathic experiences. And you really feel like you become a part of the jungle," he said of the experience. Highlighting the importance of altering one's perception to gain new perspectives and understandings, he noted that insights from ayahuasca can be similar to what is gleaned from some types of therapy.

You discover who you are by going into your shadow and integrating those parts of yourself that you have denied, he remarked, adding that every time you bring these parts back to yourself, you're bringing in the energy that you've had to use to keep various traumas in place, and as a result of this, energy becomes more available to you and your awareness expands. The center of the universe is located between one's eyes, he declared, and this represents the shift from personality-centered to essence-centered awareness. Pallamary also talked about his fiction writing process and how the art of storytelling is a form of magic-- the word 'spelling' actually comes from the notion of casting a spell, he pointed out.