Poetry Santa Cruz | About Poetry Santa Cruz

Bios for the members of the Board of Directors of Poetry Santa Cruz

Len Anderson
Susan Freeman
Dennis Morton
Pam O'Shaughnessy
Beth Pittenger
Tilly Shaw

Len
photo by Sandra Vines Walker Len Anderson has a BA and PhD in Physics from UC Berkeley. He worked for four years in experimental elementary particle physics and nearly 16 years at Measurex Corporation (now part of Honeywell), developing sensors for the automation of the manufacture of paper. He and his wife have lived in Live Oak since 1998.
Len has been writing poetry since 1985 and has studied with Richard Maxwell, Robert Bly, Joseph Stroud and Joseph McNeilly. His work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Caesura, The DMQ Review, Good Times, Harvest from the Emerald Orchard, Monterey Poetry Review, The Montserrat Review, Porter Gulch Review, Quarry West Poets and Writers of the Monterey Bay Anthology, The Sand Hill Review, Sarasota Review of Poetry, and The Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets 2004. He is a winner of the Dragonfly Press Poetry Competition, the Mary Lönnberg Smith Poetry Award (Cabrillo College) and has received a Pushcart nomination from The DMQ Review. His first collection of poems is Affection for the Unknowable (Hummingbird Press, 2003). He has also published a chapbook, BEEP.
At Poetry Santa Cruz, Len serves as Secretary-Treasurer. He has primary responsibility for publicity (flyers, email announcements, press calendar announcements, website maintenance), meeting notes, research on readers, Thank You letters to readers, database, PA system and archives, financial records and budgets, non-profit status, grant applications and reports and is Contact Person. He has directed the High School Poetry Competition and coordinates with Poet/Speak, Poetry Center San Jose and our volunteers. He also helps with distribution of membership premiums and setting up events.
Contact: len@poetrysantacruz.org
Susan Susan Freeman moves between teaching writing to K-12 students and teachers and her own poetry. Living in Santa Cruz County for more than 30 years, she has worked as a classroom teacher and teacher educator, most recently at UC Santa Cruz as co-director of the Central California Writing Project and with the Pájaro Valley Unified School District. In Watsonville, she coordinated Voces Rurales/Rural Voices: Writing from the Places We Call Home, a school writing program which provided opportunities for immigrant students and their teachers to publish, perform and broadcast their own writing. Susan co-directed the UCSC Writing Project’s Invitational Summer Institute for eight years, and has worked with The Cultural Council of SC County, SPECTRA, and the Bay Area California Arts Project, as a teacher educator and artist-in-residence focusing on an interdisciplinary approach to literacy and the arts. She has an MA from Pacific Oaks College and taught there, at UCSC and Cabrillo College. Her other passion is community radio. Since 1977, she has produced or hosted literary, music, and children’s programs on Santa Cruz NPR-affiliate station KUSP. Her poetry has appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, including Quarry West, Poets and Writers of the Monterey Bay, 100 Poets Against the War, The Napa Review, In Celebration of the Muse, and on-line publications. She participated in readings in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Toronto, and Dublin, Ireland, where she studied with poet Paula Meehan.
In an attempt to make poetry again central to her life, after a decade deluged by academic papers and grant proposals, Susan has recently joined the board of Poetry Santa Cruz. Her first ventures will include helping to coordinate the High School Poetry Competition and taking turns engineering “The Poetry Show” on KUSP.
Contact: susan@poetrysantacruz.org

Dennis Dennis Morton serves as President of Poetry Santa Cruz. He was educated at Syracuse University and The State University of New York, College at Oswego, where he studied poetry with Lewis Turco, author of the classic The Book of Forms.
In 1983 he moved to Santa Cruz from upstate New York. For 15 years he worked in the retail natural foods industry, organizing, managing, and owning natural foods stores.
For the past several years Dennis has taught writing workshops to incarcerated youths and led poetry workshops in alternative education class rooms. For thirteen years he has co-hosted The Poetry Show on KUSP, a public radio station serving the central California coast. (The Poetry Show is the oldest radio poetry program in the country.) Dennis also reviews films for KUSP as a member of The Film Gang. (The Poetry Show and The Film Gang are now podcast on the KUSP website.) Dennis also assists the Features Editor at Good Times, (a local A&E weekly newspaper) by recommending poems and essays for inclusion in The Poetry Corner, a twice-monthly full-page column.
Dennis books the readings for Poetry Santa Cruz and serves as Master of Ceremonies at the reading series.
Contact: dennis@poetrysantacruz.org

Pam O’Shaughnessy is Co-Vice-President of Poetry Santa Cruz, a moderator at The Critical Poet, a founding member of The Orzel Project, an avant-garde poetry cooperative, and the author of Flying at Sea-Level, a book of poems. She is a novelist by trade.
Contact: pam@poetrysantacruz.org

Beth Beth Pittenger is a student of Zen, haiku, poetry, and Japanese. She was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, studying Greek, Latin, and English literature. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Intellectual History from Johns Hopkins University. She taught at UC Berkeley in the field of Renaissance literature, technology, and gender studies before deciding to devote her time to writing. Currently enrolled in a graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, she intends to explore depth psychology, existentialism, and Buddhism in order to train as a psychotherapist.
Her services in the field of poetry include being a moderator online at a haiku oriented site called Aha! Poetry and as a former moderator on a general poetry site called The Critical Poet. She also is part of a haibun writing group run by the editor of Contemporary Haibun Online, where she has published pieces. For Poetry Santa Cruz, she volunteered to revive the Newsletter and has taken on other roles, such as advising, reader introductions, communications with Cabrillo College, and In Celebration of the Muse. She is now co-Vice President.
Contact: beth@poetrysantacruz.org

Tilly By birthright a New Englander, Tilly Washburn Shaw came west to Santa Cruz, California, in mid-life, to join in building a new campus of the University of California in the late 60's, often returned later to Massachusetts in the summer. She did her bachelor's degree at Swarthmore, her doctorate at Yale in Comparative Literature; taught at Haverford College, Douglas College of Rutgers, and Yale University before joining the Literature faculty at UC/Santa Cruz. When younger, she published a book on three modern poets and later began writing poetry herself. After 37 years of teaching, she retired to the enjoyments of age, lives in Santa Cruz with her fruit trees, friends, writing groups and books, does lay counseling with seniors, travels, swims in any ocean she is able to. Her first collection of poems is Swimming Closer to Shore (Hummingbird Press, 2002).
Tilly Shaw helps with our member relations, distributing membership premiums, sending out thank you letters and renewal reminders. She also provides liaison with UC Santa Cruz, which brings some of our visiting readers into their Creative Writing classrooms and pays them through the George Hitchcock Fund, thus making their long-distance travel affordable. Tilly also assists at our events by introducing readers.
Contact: tilly@poetrysantacruz.org