Blackbird/Diode Reading, AWP 2013 

Brynn Saito is the author of The Palace of Contemplating Departure (Red Hen Press, 2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. She is the coauthor, with Traci Brimhall, of the poetry chapbook Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013). Her work appears in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Pleiades and has been anthologized in Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), and From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas 1900–2002 (Da Capo Press, 2002) edited by Ishmael Reed. Saito is the recipient of a fellowship from Kundiman, a Poets 11 award from the San Francisco Public Library, and the Key West Literary Seminar’s Scotti Merrill Memorial Award. Saito teaches at California Institute of Integral Studies and Sofia University.  

Photo by Curt Richter, 2011