Julia B. Levine, Naomi Janowitz, Dyson Smith

On the 12/4/24 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Julia B. Levine phones in to describe her feelings upon receiving the Poet Laureate Fellowship from the American Academy of Poetry. She outlines tomorrow night's event at the John Natsoulas Gallery, where students from Davis Junior High will be reading their own original poetry that Levine helped workshop. Levine then shares one of her student's poems titled, “Be More Like a Cockroach” from 16 Rivers Press’s Seeds of Hope Collection, which contains poems from the middle schoolers. The next guest on the show is Professor Naomi Janowitz, who discusses restarting her public affairs show at KDVS, which focuses on UC Davis research. Janowitz also shares her feelings about how poetry should not be gatekept. She described how she starts many of her classes, prompting students to write an American haiku about a topic of their choice. The last guest on the show is Dyson Smith, who compares his calculated boxing approach to his poetics. He discusses some of his scholarly endeavors before sharing a poem, “California Sober.”

Naomi Janowitz is Professor of Religious Studies. Her areas of interest are Judaism in the Greco-Roman context, Hellenistic religions, methods in the study of religions, and the psychoanalytic study of religion. Publications include: Icons of Power: Ritual Practices in Late Antiquity (Penn State University Press, 2002) and Magic in the Roman World (Routledge, 2001). Her first book won the Outstanding Academic Book Award from Library/Choice Journal. She has also won an essay prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association and a teaching award from the UC Davis Academic Senate.

Davis Poet Laurete Julia B. Levine’s poetry has won many awards. Recently she has won the 2024 Hippocrates International Prize for Poetry and Medicine, the 2023 Oran Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, the 2022 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, the 2020 Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Award, as well as a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resiliency in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science and technology. She received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University.

Dyson Smith is a Chicago born poet studying Statistics at the University of California, Davis. Smith serves as the Co-Community-Coordinator and DJ at the  KDVS, a Researcher at the UC Davis Innovations and Research Lab, and the producer of Dr.Andy’s poetry and technology hour. His work has been published in KDVATIONs, Open Ceilings, The Sacramento Poetry Center’s Poet News, GTFO Poetry’s 2024 Anthology of Sacramento Poets, and has two poems forthcoming in The Madison Review.

The Poetry Night Reading Series will feature Davis junior high poets and their new book, Seeds of Hope. We meet at 7 PM on Thursday, December 5th, 2024, on the first floor of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 1st Street in Davis.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, visit his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.