Stone Soup Poetry meets every Wednesday online from 7:00-9:00 PM via Zoom. Stay tuned for updates on any future live gatherings. On July 29, we conclude the month of July with former Boston poet Diana Saenz.
Diana Saenz has been writing since 1964, at the age of 16, when she attained her first typewriter by saving Green Stamps. This instinct for the advantage of technology has never waned. Neither has her commitment to the written word. Her life in the arts, surrounded by actors, playwrights, poets, dancers, artists, and writers, is the gift that writing gave her, and for this she is ever humble and grateful.Diana is a native of Los Angeles, where she encountered her first writers at East L.A. College, and was part of the community in the early 70s, mixing with activists of every sort, from the Chicano Renaissance of graphic artists and writers, in magazines like Con Safos, to the Brown Berets to the Revolutionary Communist Party. After she was evicted from the RCP, she made her way to San Francisco, joining the vibrant poetry scene, which included forces of nature like Jack Hershman, Joie Cook, and Bob Kaufman, and where she morphed into performance poetry. From there, she traveled overseas and lived in London, mixing with the thriving community of poets. Upon her return to San Francisco, performance poetry led to playwriting and a decade in the Theatre community, particularly the Latino Theatre Artists Association, which included Cherie Moraga, Josefina López, and Octavio Solis. She and others established Sangre, a multicultural theatre company, and produced a number of plays.
Feeling burnout, Diana moved to France before returning to this hemisphere, where she settled in Montreal, Canada for six months before her visa expired, then moved to the East Coast after a year in Alabama, where she wrote The Book of Eve. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, she found that there was no calendar for poets like Poetry Flash in San Francisco, and established the Boston Poet Calendar and Magazine, which was later run by Debbie Burn. Later, she established BostonPoet.com and created an interactive calendar that anyone could populate with their poetry announcements. She met her husband, Marshall Harvey, at TT The Bears, a popular Stone Soup Thursday night Poetry Venue in the 1990s run by Jack Powers. Together, she and Marshall published the works of other poets, including Bas Ass and Virgin Voyage, which featured C.C. Colins, Meg Smith, Afaa Weaver, Walter Howard, and Raffy Woof.
After twenty years on the East Coast, one Spring—not up for another nor’easter—Diana returned to her native California in 2013, where she wrote her first novel. She eventually settled in Murrieta, CA, 60 miles south of Los Angeles. There she tried comedy for a year, but could not get past the misogynistic and politically reactionary side of it, or the late, late, very late nights. But she did learn to overcome her fear of performing off-book.
Today, Diana continues to write political articles on Substack, books, and the occasional poem. She is active in the Temecula Valley Atheists Meetup group, teaches yoga (having received her certification earlier this year), and is currently working on a yoga manual for seniors to be published in September.
Join us on Wednesday, July 29, from 7:00 to 9:00 PM ET by clicking this link.
The meeting ID is 870 1187 2142
Password: stonesoup
