About the Author
Richard Beban turned to poetry in 1993 after more than thirty years as a journalist, then a television and screen writer. He holds a BA in Liberal Studies, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. His poetry has appeared since 1994 in more than forty-five periodicals and literary Websites, and in sixteen national anthologies, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. With his wife, the writer Kaaren Kitchell, and three other poets, he helped organize and run one of Los AngelesÂ’ most successful weekly reading series at VeniceÂ’s Rose Cafe, and he and Kitchell produced the 2003 Freshwater Marsh Ecopoetry Celebration at Playa Vista, California in a five-hour celebration of the new freshwater marsh constructed to help restore Ballona Wetlands. He has been a featured reader at more than fifty venues, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to BerkeleyÂ’s CodyÂ’s Books, to Shakespeare & Company, Paris. He and Kitchell, who co-authored a non-fiction book on mythology, run a monthly poetry and fiction workshop series in their living room in Playa del Rey, California.
