~ BIOS ~
The four poets of CAHUENGA PRESS have distinguished histories of publication, performance and teaching.
JAMES CUSHING holds a doctorate in English from the University of California at Irvine, and teaches literature and writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Formerly the director of the Al's Bar Poetry Series and host of a live poetry program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Cushing has published poetry and criticism in Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, Third Coast, Yalobusha Review, and many other journals. Of his first book, You and the Night and the Music (Cahuenga Press, 1991, o.p.), W.S. Merwin praised its "evident intelligence, and depth and maturity of feeling." Three poems from You and the Night and the Music appear in The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology #2, from Indiana University Press. Of his second book, The Length of an Afternoon, Michael C. Ford declares that Cushing "writes with brave, bold, noble strokes of poetic integrity." Cahuenga Press brought out his third collection, Undercurrent Blues, in 2005. Cushing also hosts a weekly jazz program on KCPR-FM, the college radio station in San Luis Obispo.
PHOEBE MACADAMS, author of Livelihood (Cahuenga Press, 2003), Ordinary Snake Dance (Cahuenga Press, 1994), Sunday (Tombouctou Press, 1983), and Ever (Rose Valley Press, 1985), as well as Strange Grace (Cahuenga Press, 2007), was a founding member of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival. For two years, she ran the Gasoline Alley reading series on Melrose Avenue with the poet, Bill Mohr. She has lived in the poetry communities of Bolinas, California and Boulder, Colorado. She currently lives in Pasadena with her husband, Ron Ozuna, and teaches at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights. She has read her poetry all over the United States, and has published in The World, Peninsula, Sheila-Na-Gig, Pearl, Attaboy Magazine, The Ojai Review and other journals. According to poet Joanne Kyger, she "is sorrowful, careful, graceful, and romantic." She "sees the angels in the homeless around her...finds her family in breathing...and a home in the poem."
HARRY E. NORTHUP has had nine books of poetry published: Amarillo Born, the jon voight poems, Eros Ash, Enough the Great Running Chapel, the images we possess kill the capturing, The Ragged Vertical, Reunions, Greatest Hits, 1996-2001, and Red Snow Fence. He received his B.A. in English from C.S.U.N. where he studied verse with Ann Stanford. New Alliance Records has released his "Personal Crime, new and selected poems from 1966-1991" on CD and cassette audio recording, and "Homes" on CD. Northup has made a living as an actor for thirty years, acting in thirty-seven films, including "Taxi Driver" (1976 Palme d'Or winner at Cannes), and "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991 Oscar winner for Best Picture). Harry is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Lewis MacAdams, in the L.A. Weekly, wrote, "Northup is the poet laureate of east Hollywood."
HOLLY PRADO's work combines the personal and the mythic with evocative intensity and has appeared in more than a hundred publications and a dozen anthologies, both nationally and internationally. Her seventh book, Esperanza: Poems for Orpheus (Cahuenga Press, 1998), has been highly praised, particularly in The Women's Review of Books (Wellesley College) and The Chicago Review. In 1999, she received First Prize in the Los Angeles Poetry Festival's Fin de Millennium Awards. She teaches both privately and in the USC graduate writing program. These Mirrors Proove It: Selected Poems and Prose, 1970-2003 was published in 2004. She was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the City of Los Angeles in 2006.
CAHUENGA PRESS is owned, financed and operated by its poet-members. A beacon for imaginative literature, CAHUENGA PRESS represents all that is best in the American small-press tradition.