My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers
Kattywompus Press, 2012
Paperback, $18

My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers is MFA Program in Writing faculty Zack Rogow's seventh collection of poetry. The book is "Dedicated in loving memory of my mother, Mildred 'Mickey' Rogow: These poems celebrate her life and values, as well as the reasons for living that eluded her at points along her path." This is Kattywompus Press’s first full-length book, and it is hand-sewn, hand-glued, hand-bound.

Two of the poems have been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize. Several of the poems have already been published in anthologies. A series of tanka poems in the collection won the Tanka Splendor Award for best tanka sequence in English. Melissa Stein, author of Rough Honey, says, "Zack Rogow's poems tenderly evoke life’s ironies, bitter and sweet. They have a passionate sweep: the East River to Venice canals, Van Gogh's ear to sandcastles, filterless Pall Malls to the dazzling, dying stars. And they have a big, beautiful, aching, resonant heart."

"I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being." -- Oscar Wilde

In the last year a growing number of CCA graduates -- each representing a unique program of study -- has tapped into the Bay Area's richly diverse and proliferating performing arts scene to have a full-scale world premiere of their work brought to fruition. Among these impressive alumnae are:

Candacy Taylor (MFA Visual Criticism 2002)

One More for the People
Perfect Day Publishing, 2011
Paperback, 224 pages, $16

Eight years in the making, One More for the People is the first collection from Martha Grover's (MFA Writing 2010) Somnambulist zine. Playful, wry, and conversational, it chronicles three generations in the life of the Grover family. As the idiosyncratic characters reluctantly confront adulthood, one Grover is always there to take notes. But after she’s diagnosed with a rare, potentially fatal disease (the 81 side effects of which include dramatic changes in her appearance, not to mention the dreaded possibility of having to move back home), the book becomes something unexpected: a survival guide.

Named one of the Best of 2011 by the Portland Mercury!

Read the reviews in the Portland Mercury and the SF Weekly.

Create
Berkeley Art Museum, 2011
Paperback, 179 pages, $27.50

Writing and Visual and Critical Studies faculty member Kevin Killian contributes to this book, published on the occasion of a groundbreaking museum exhibition curated by Lawrence Rinder (former CCA Wattis Institute director) with Matthew Higgs (former CCA Wattis Institute curator). Create showcases work made at the three Bay Area centers for artists with developmental disabilities: Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Creativity Explored in San Francisco, and the National Institute of Art and Disabilities in Richmond. Florence Ludins-Katz and Elias Katz, who today are recognized as pioneers of the art and disabilities movement, founded these centers between 1972 and 1982. This richly illustrated catalogue offers an overview of the work being made there today, including works on paper, paintings, and sculpture.