~ BIOS ~
The four poets of CAHUENGA PRESS have distinguished histories of publication, performance and teaching.
JAMES CUSHING, “one of the few psychedelic pirates of poetry” (Holaday Mason), is Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo for 2008-2010. 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, Barnwood, Denver Quarterly, as well as dozens of other journals since 1979. Cahuenga Press has published three previous collections: You and the Night and the Music (1991, o.p.), The Length of an Afternoon (1999) and Undercurrent Blues (2005). W.S. Merwin has praised his poetry’s “evident intelligence, and depth and maturity,” while Amy Gerstler has noted that “Cushing infuses his shifting, surreal vision with undercurrents of deep feeling.” Cushing teaches literature and creative writing at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, where he also hosts a weekly jazz program on KCPR-FM, the college radio station in San Luis Obispo.
PHOEBE MACADAMS is the author of Strange Grace (Cahuenga Press, 2007), Livelihood (Cahuenga Press, 2003), Ordinary Snake Dance (Cahuenga Press, 1994), Sunday (Tombouctou Press, 1983), and Ever (Rose Valley Press, 1985). She 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. She taught English at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights for twenty-six years. She has given readings 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 ten 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, Red Snow Fence and Where Bodies Again Recline. 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 has been writing and publishing for many years. Her work, which combines the personal and the mythic with evocative intensity, 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 taught for twenty years at USC; she now teaches privately. Her selected poems and prose, These Mirrors Prove It, was published by Cahuenga Press in 2004. She was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the City of Los Angeles in 2006. Her latest Cahuenga Press book is From One to the Next (2008).
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.