Kathryn Joyce Jerrell Hohlwein was born in Salt Lake City, Utah. She graduated from the University of Utah in 1951 and received an M.A. degree from The Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in Vermont in 1953.

After this she traveled extensively in France, Germany, Lebanon and Scotland, married a German artist, and had three children.  She taught for nine years at universities in the Midwest and moved with her family to Sacramento, California in 1963 where she became a Professor in English and Humanities and is now Professor Emerita.

Since 1998 she has been President and Founder of The International Readers of Homer, a non-profit which presents audience-participation, all-night readings, all over the world. of either Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad.   This work can be reviewed here.

She had always enjoyed collaboration and published Touchstones: Letters Between Two Women, l953-1964 with Harper and Row in New York, and Rowohlt Verlag in Hamburg.  For twelve years she was Poetry and Art Editor of a scholarly journal entitled Studia Mystica. She has published a collaborative book of poetry with her daughter, Laura, called What’s Funny About Forever. She has a book of her collected poems called The Little Chapel in Donegal. She was recently included in a publication called Philhellenes, 14 Portraits, a collection of writings of lovers of Greek culture. Her letters and other writings are collected in The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library of American Women at Harvard. At 91, she continues to travel, edit, and write.

Laura Hohlwein was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1963 but grew up largely in Sacramento, California.

She studied at Oberlin College, McGill University and got a BA in English from California State University, Sacramento.  She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College and an MFA in New Media Interdisciplinary Art from Transart Institute in Austria.  She was the recipient of two teaching grants from the California Arts Council for her work with prison inmates and from The Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Council for video poetry.

She has had poems published in Green Mountains Press, Poetry Miscellany, The Eleventh Muse, Tule Review and others and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A collection of her collaborative poetry with her mother, Kathryn Hohlwein, called What’s Funny About Forever, was published in 2018 by Random Lane Press.

A dedicated painter, she has been exhibited in California, New York and in Europe and has won several fellowships and residency grants in support of her artistic practice. You can see her work here. Laura teaches Drawing, Painting, Digital Art, Art History, and Video Editing in the Los Rios Community College District. She loves big dogs, thunderstorms and walks on the beach.

(May I also direct you to this gorgeous artist’s statement Laura wrote.)

Patrick Grizzell is a poet, songwriter and visual artist. His books include Dark Music, Chicken Months (about which Robert Bly wrote, “… the poems have a sweet spontaneity and tenderness.”), Minotaure Into Night (with sumi paintings by Jimi Suzuki), 13 Poems, It’s Like That, and the relatively forthcoming The Vignettes.

He was a founding member and previous director of, as well as an editor for, the Sacramento Poetry Center. He founded or co-founder most the SPC publications, and has conducted many interviews with noted writers and artists, including, among others, Helene Pons, Fernando Alegria, Robert Bly, Linda McCartney, and Ruth Weiss. He also occasionally writes reviews and essays about literature and art. He was editor-in-chief of On The Wing, an arts magazine, and has written for many other publications.He has given lectures and led workshops at many writer’s conferences and in literary series, and taught poetry as a guest lecturer at colleges and in several California prisons (Arts In Corrections).

He has performed poetry and music with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Leon Redbone, Jim Ringer, Ed Sanders, Robert Creeley, Shizumi Shigeto Manale, and others.He studied art and literature at CSUS with Dennis Schmitz, Kathryn Hohlwein, Leon Golub, Eugene Redmond, Maya Angelou, John Fitzgibbon, Jimi Suzuki and others.His band, Proxy Moon, released its premiere CD in 2016. A second is in the works, or so the story goes.

John Lee Hooker once said he “sound pretty good” on the dobro.

Daniel Schoorl was born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1957. He studied oil painting and drawing at Sacramento State University and privately with Joan Ito. He has shown his art in California, Uruguay, Argentina, and Portugal. Over the last two decades his work with chalk pastel and charcoal pencil has developed into a style uniquely his own with attention to technical detail and imagination.

Deborah Rhea: “I am a Sacramento, California based photographer and include Spain and Uruguay as second homes. Using both film and digital images I focus on capturing the essence of a face or the light in a street. I like to mark time in street photography by including signs, cars and everyday activity. The abstraction of nature fascinates me, too, but portraiture is my favorite subject. I love working with people in that way. I’m not a technical photographer. For me, the equipment is secondary to the eye. I still use my first camera, a Nikon FE, and a pocket Yashika when using film. My digital camera is a new Canon 77D, which has a lot of bells and whistles but I am figuring it out. I have been taking pictures for 40 years. I have shown in several galleries in Sacramento over the last 15 years, with some shows including  collaborative pieces with my husband, Daniel Schoorl.”

Deborah will be documenting the retreat and will have images available.