Invitation to meet Sonoma County's new Poet Laureate Maya Khosla - Sunday, April 29 - 3:00 PM at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts

[Larry Robinson]

Maya Khosla has been chosen to be Sonoma County’s 10th Poet Laureate by a committee of her peers. Her term will begin May 1, 2018 and continue until December 31, 2019. Ms. Khosla’s work has taken her to wilderness areas, to the page and to the screen. She was one of the first volunteers allowed to document the vigorous natural regeneration in Pepperwood Preserve, following the October 2017 fires in Sonoma, and her work is currently ongoing with a team of volunteers. She often combines poetry and film. Her published works include award-winning poetry, non-fiction ,and scripts for documentary films including Village of Dust, City of Water, Shifting Undercurrents, and Searching for the Gold Spot: The Wild After Wildfire. Maya has worked on natural resource surveys throughout California as well as in Kenya and India.

On Sunday, April 29, 2018, Ms. Khosla will be presented to the public at a reception at Sebastopol Center for the Arts taking place in the Brent Auditorium at 3PM. The reception will be attended by past Poets Laureate and the public is invited to come for dessert, beverages and poetry as the mantle is passed from the 9th Sonoma County Poet Laureate, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, to the 10th.

Please us join us in celebrating Sonoma County’s newest Poet Laureate, Maya Khosla.



Rejuvenation

	Most of the biodiversity in these forests depends on wildland fire. 
Chad Hanson 

Once we have looked away, once we have mourned 
and banished all smoldering thoughts about the tribe 
of blackened trees replacing the known world—            
for now and another season – and the last long 
fingers of smoke have been ushered out by wind, a 
ticking begins. No one has seen them arriving in 
such numbers, but the birds are neither lost nor passing 
through. They are simply linked tight to the newborn 
scents of ash and rain, to the promise of white fruits,
the riches concealed by bark.

So were the ways of ancestors who began their 
journeys as specks in the distance, some fifty 
thousand years ago. Riding the miles of smoky gold, 
along                 a known line of hunger, growing closer and closer.    
The rufous beat of instinct working a 
migration upstream against the flow of smoke. Into 
the source, its multiple treasures.

One new arrival looks bright with hope. He preens his 
dusk-and-opal plumage. Others tap like as if knocking 
on doors. The answers have all been provided by the 
ages, delicate as genetic fibers coiled in each cell— 
beak and bone, muscle and shiny eye. The living           
are awake to the growth and profusion soon to follow. 
They will grow with the diligence of all known colors 
unfurling from the soil’s chocolatey darkness, from 
the trees re-greening come spring, from the 
blackness. 

	- Maya Rani Khosla
	  
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