Internationally renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder will close the conference with a Saturday reading at 11 a.m. Both readings are sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities and are free and open to the public. Alongside English professor Jack Hicks and fellow writers Al Young and James Houston, Kingston will discuss the making of the forthcoming landmark collection of California literature from Native American beginnings to the present. The first volume of the two-volume anthology is 620 pages long and is scheduled for September publication. Included in the book will be 15 pages of photographs.
Topics range from early Native American folktales to contemporary novelists and performance poets.
Beth Lisick, a popular San Francisco performance poet who works with a band, will also perform. Houston and Gerald Haslam, prominent California fiction and nonfiction writers active over the last three decades, will receive Distinguished Achievements Awards and offer readings of their work Friday.