Meet your Instructors:

Steve Abee
is the author of the novel, Johnny Future (MP Press); The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily Mind in Transit ( Phony Lid Books), and a collection of short stories and poems, King Planet (Incommunicado), plus a number of poetry chapbooks, most notably Die for Love and Vision to Los Angeles. He was born in Santa Monica, California and began writing after high school when he held a job as an orderly at St. John’s Hospital. His mind started to unfold itself, and he thought if he was going to save it, he better start writing things down. “I saw the fragility and blessedness of lives and started to come apart in the wonderment of it all.”

Abee is all about Whitman, and Kerouac, Miller and Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas and James Dean, Beachcomber Bums and Thunderbird Winos, Thomas Merton and Jack Kornfield. He's a smarty pants far-out, literary space nut: as numerous fans remark, particularly the late great Michelle Serros, experiencing Abee perform his work in person is like a university lecture - if Iggy Pop was the professor! Suffice it to say, Abee is his own kind of King Planet, a live wire whose work seeks the ecstatic universal in the common grains of the day. Beck Hansen, way back in 1996, called Abee "The Love Powered Bull Horn blasting down from the altitudes," and Lydia Lunch, back in 2003, remarked that his "... savage poetry demands the reader devour passage after passage, only to be left soul seared and simultaneously re-invigorated."  

He holds a Master of Fine Arts Degree from Antioch University, Los Angeles and teaches American Literature in Downtown Los Angeles. He lives in the El Sereno with his wife and two kids. He's a rarebird angelfied digger of all to be dug.

Brendan Constantine
was born in Los Angeles, the second child of two working actors, and named after Irish playwright Brendan Behan. An ardent supporter of Southern California’s poetry communities and one of its most recognized poets, he has served as a teacher of poetry in local schools and colleges for the last eighteen years. In addition, he brings poetry workshops to hospitals, foster care centers & shelters for the homeless. He is also very proud of his work with the Alzheimer's Poetry Project. 
His first collection, Letters To Guns, was released in February 2009 from Red Hen Press to wide acclaim. It is now extensively taught in schools throughout the Southland. His work has appeared in numerous journals, most notably Ploughshares, FIELD, Rattle, ZYZZYVA, Ninth Letter, The Pinch, ArtLife and LA Times Bestseller The Underground Guide to Los Angeles. His most recent collections are Birthday Girl With Possum (2011 Write Bloody Publishing) and Calamity Joe (2012 red Hen Press).

In spring of 2012, Brendan toured California on a grant from the James Irvine Foundation, bringing his poetry workshops to schools, libraries, correctional facilities, & community centers. “I know every student doesn’t want to be a professional poet. But if poetry is a kind of ‘language within a language’ (Paul Valery), then I believe the skills of poetry - the arts of simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, meter, etc. – are useful and practical, a means of doubling our available vocabulary. Anyone with even a little poetry in them is better equipped to relate their world to someone else.”

In addition to his post as poet-in-residence at the Windward School, Brendan regularly volunteers with organizations like the Art of Elysium. He is also currently working with the Craft & Folk Art Museum of Los Angeles on a project that invites established and emerging authors to bear upon changing exhibits.

He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Hollywood at Bela Lugosi’s last address.

Susan Ahdoot, CST, RPP, Yoga Instructor, Health Coach, Artist and Poet
works with the energetic field of the body to locate where energetic patterns are holding past traumas or beliefs that inhibit wellness, creative expression, or joy. In releasing these patterns from the system, the client experiences a deep state of relaxation and release that allows for the parasympathetic nervous system to engage and facilitate healing and vitality to the body. She whole-heartedly believes in the bodies’ intelligence to heal itself, that we simply have to remove the obstacles to healing. Susan uses therapeutic grade essential oils in her practice to assist in both physical and emotional release, and to support and help the body come to its natural state of well-being. The essential oils have a vibrational pattern that help bring the energetic field of a person into alignment, releasing patterns of tension and disease. She has trained and taught the Raindrop Technique, a treatment that relaxes the nervous system, supports the immune system and invokes a state of tremendous well-being. She has worked with clients to heal from injury, to achieve and maintain a healthy and comfortable pregnancy, and to identify patterns and release blocks for optimal health and well-being. She is interested in helping every client to achieve more balance, more peace, more well-ness, to simply feel better. Susan teaches workshops that combine her multi-disciplinary approach to wellness. She teaches a variety of workshops from anti-aging to accessing your inner peace.

Susan Ahdoot practices an integrative approach to body/mind wellness bringing a multi-disciplinary approach to her practice. She has trained in Shiatsu/Anma, Reiki, Cranial-Sacral Therapy, Polarity Therapy, Sound Healing, Essential Oil Therapy, and has trained and taught both Kundalini Yoga and Hatha Yoga. She has been in practice since 1994, bringing over twenty years of experience to her clients. She has traveled extensively with clients.

As a writer and artist, Susan understands the creative process and how the body can hold blocks to creativity and alternatively how movement and energy can help to unleash creative expression, and that the body can inform the creative process. Her artwork has been in many shows around LA, including publication in several journals. She has several chapbooks: Heat, The End to Inertia, and Before Yes. Additional publication credits include: GW Review, The Great American Poetry Show, Fuck This Shit. LOUDmouth, Poetix, The Comstock Review (finalist), and the Spire Press Bonus Issue: Sex.

She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Sarah Maclay’s 
latest release is, Music for the Black Room (U of Tampa Press). Her poems and criticism have been published widely in spots such as APR, Ploughshares, FIELD, The Writer’s Chronicle, Poetry Daily, The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present, and Poetry International, where she has long served as book review editor. The recipient of a Pushcart Special Mention, she earned a BA in English at Oberlin College, and an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College. She chairs the Creative Writing Committee at LMU, where she has taught creative writing and literature since 2005. She’s also taught at USC and FIDM, and conducted workshops and classes at the Ruskin Art Club, privately, and at Beyond Baroque, where she has been a Poet-in-Residence and teaches in the Mini-Masters Class series. In 2015, she was awarded a residency at Yaddo.  The “She” Series: A Venice Correspondence, her braided collaboration with Holaday Mason, will be out in fall 2016 from What Books Press.

Terrie Silverman, MFA
is a Writer, Performer, Director, an Artist-in-Residence at Beyond Baroque Literary|Arts Center, and Founder of Creative Rites Workshops/Coaching for Writing, Performance & Creative Expression. She facilitates workshops for groups and individuals to release the critic, access one’s authentic voice and discover our stories matter. She's facilitated workshops for the California Arts Council, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Monica Cultural Affairs Department, the City of West Hollywood, the L.A. Women's Theatre Festival, The West Hollywood Book Festival, Screen Actor's Guild Media Access, the Independent Writer's of Southern California, Los Angeles Association of Marriage, Family Therapists - Expressive Arts, UCLArts & Healing, Senior Arts Foundation and Women in Theatre. 

Her students & clients include Obie-award winner Heather Woodbury, Laraine Newman (original cast, SNL), Mimi Kennedy (Midnight in Paris, Mom), Melora Hardin (The Office, Cabaret on Broadway, Transparent), Olivia D’Abo (The Wonder Years), Robert Wisdom (The Wire), Henri Esteve (Revenge), and John Fugelsang (Radio Host-Tell Me Everything SiriusXM & The upcoming- PBS special- The American Dream.)

Ms Silverman has helped develop a number of award-winning solo-shows that have toured internationally and have been presented off-Broadway, including Ann Randolph's Squeezebox produced by Mel Brooks.    www.creativerites.com 

Mike Sonksen, also known as, Mike the Poet, is a 3rd-generation LA native acclaimed for poetry performances, published articles and poetic city tours. He graduated from the University of California Los Angeles and is finishing an advanced degree at California State University Los Angeles. Sonksen has lectured at and had his book, I AM ALIVE IN LOS ANGELES! added to the curriculum of over 60 universities and high schools.

In 1997, Sonksen was the first undergraduate ever published in Critical Planning, UCLA School of Urban Planning’s annual academic journal. Sonksen studied with City of Quartz author, Mike Davis and distinguished Urban Planning Professor, Brian Taylor while at UCLA before graduating. Following graduation, Sonksen led city tours for the Museum of Neon Art, Museum of Architecture & Design and Craft & Folk Art Museum. Combining poetry and history, his unique tours were covered in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Flavorpill and Daily Trojan. Sonksen's published prose has been in Poets & Writers, Wax Poetics, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, OC Weekly, LA Alternative Press, Big Bridge and countless others.

His weekly KCET column, LA Letters celebrates bright moments from literary Los Angeles. LA Times Book Review Editor Steve Wasserman selected Sonksen to perform his poem, LA Authors as the finale to the 2001 LA Times Book Prizes.

Sonksen performed at the North Beach Jazz Festival, The Roxy, Viper Room, The Echo, Hotel Café, Stella Adler Theater, The Standard Hotel, the Beat Museum, the Association of Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference in Chicago in 2012 and for Landscape Architecture Students at Cal Poly Pomona, among many others. Sonksen’s poems have aired on KCRW, KPFK, KPFA and KXLU.

Sonksen has mentored hundreds of young writers in his classes, poetry workshops, 15 years of producing literary events and in the several literary magazines and websites he’s served as an editor. Sonksen taught at View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter High School in the Crenshaw District where he was voted “Most Inspirational Teacher.” Several of his students won writing competitions through the Department of Cultural Affairs.

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