LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Charles Entrekin, Author of Listening: New & Selected Work

Saturday, January 8, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Charles Entrekin was born in 1941 in Birmingham, Alabama,.  He took his BA in English from Birmingham Southern College, in 1964.  He left Birmingham in 1965 and lived in various states (New York , Tennessee, Alabama, and Montana) while pursuing advanced degrees in philosophy and creative writing.  Arriving in California in 1969, he fell in love with the West Coast scene and the Hotel California experience.  He now lives in Berkeley with his wife, poet, Gail Rudd Entrekin.

Charles has taught at almost every educational level.  He taught pre-school language skills to six-year-olds with he Head Start program in Birmingham, Alabama; taught introduction to set theory to disadvantaged high school graduates with the Upward Bound Program in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; taught composition, English literature, creative writing, philosophy at the college level, and was the founder of the Creative Writing Program at John F. Kennedy University’s Orinda, California campus.

For 24 years, Charles was the managing editor of The Berkeley Poets Cooperative and The Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press. The story of the Berkeley Poets Workshop & Press was written up as the cover story in the August 29, 1976 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

The Managing Editor of Hip Pocket Press (www.hippocketpress.com), Charles is also the author of In This Hour, a collection of poems, BPW&P, 1990; Casting For The Cutthroat & Other Poems, BPW&P, 1986; Casting For The Cutthroat, Thunder City Press, 1978, Birmingham, Alabama; All Pieces Of A Legacy, BPW&P, 1975, Berkeley, CA. His novel, Red Mountain, Birmingham, Alabama, 1965, was published May, 2008, by El Leon Literary Arts www.elleonliteraryarts.org .

We are celebrating his latest publication: Listening: New and Selected Work.

In “Listening: New and Selected Work,” Charles Entrekin presents us with a remarkable poetic legacy. Written between 1975 and the present, the poems in this collection are passionate and darkly lyric. Always grounded in physical reality, they transcend time and place, revealing both the great and small moments of life as seen from the perspective of eternity.
—Mary Mackey